Topic: problem with metal madness music disk

[Alexsource]

I don't know if this was discussed before, but here i go:
I don´t really know why, but i had a plylist with some tunes already and I added the metalmadness.zip file, saved the playlist and it played just as fine. Then, i happenned to make a new playlist, and when i openned the first one,which had metal madness along some other tunes, and tryed to play some of the metal madness tunes xmplay croosed it with the red line, like when the file is unavailable, but everything was and is in place, where it should be! I even openened the zip and tested it with winzip, but it said it has no errors.
I tryed making a separate new playlist for it, and the tunes worked again, but when i changed to some other playlist, and then back to the metal madness playlist, it did the red line thing again, and i had to start all over again.
This even happens when instead of opening a different playlist i reopen the metal madness playlist.
I think it might be an error in the zip plugin...
It would be good if it were fixed

[Pike84]

I haven't fiddled much with zip files, and haven't used them in XMPlay, but I was curious about this problem of yours. So I tested it and did it as you described, but I didn't get any red lines..

I can think of about three possible reasons:
1. Perhaps you're using an outdated zip plugin?
2. I am using a 2.7 beta and you are not, and the problem is somehow solved there.
3. We are using different platforms, and yours has something different about zip handling. I'm on XP Pro.


By the way, Ian, while testing that zip problem, I found a small issue with (again ) the ID tags. When a zip file is added to the list, only titles of those mp3s that have an ID3v2 tag, are properly scanned. The files with a v1 tag, are left to the filename form.

[Ian @ un4seen]

By the way, Ian, while testing that zip problem, I found a small issue with (again ) the ID tags. When a zip file is added to the list, only titles of those mp3s that have an ID3v2 tag, are properly scanned. The files with a v1 tag, are left to the filename form.

When adding an archived file to the list, XMPlay decompresses only a small part of the file - enough to check that the file is playable. This keeps things nice'n'fast when adding archives to the list, but means ID3v1 tags are not available (they're at the end of the file). Not sure I really want to change that

Of course, if you wish, you can use the "Rescan titles" option to get the missing titles

[Alexsource]

I'm using the zip plugin that is in the player page, i think it is revision 4. I tried it on two similar machines, one with xp home and the other with me, it does the same thing on both.
It's good to hear that wathever it is the problem, it is resolved in the beta. Guess i'll wait for the release them, thanks!

[Fraggie]

By the way, Ian, while testing that zip problem, I found a small issue with (again ) the ID tags. When a zip file is added to the list, only titles of those mp3s that have an ID3v2 tag, are properly scanned. The files with a v1 tag, are left to the filename form.

Who on earth would pack MP3's?...  

[DanaPaul]

Ummm.... File Share

[Pike84]

When adding an archived file to the list, XMPlay decompresses only a small part of the file - enough to check that the file is playable. This keeps things nice'n'fast when adding archives to the list, but means ID3v1 tags are not available (they're at the end of the file). Not sure I really want to change that

Oh, ok then. No big deal .

Of course, if you wish, you can use the "Rescan titles" option to get the missing titles

Well, actually this doesn't seem to be doing anything . Only playing the track appears to scan the title properly.

[Ian @ un4seen]

Oops, you're right, "rescan titles" only decompresses the start of the file too ... oh well, as Fraggie says, what's the point of ZIP'ing MP3s anyway

[Zarggg]

ZIPing an MP3 (or other lossy compression codec) is a bit like mowing the lawn, then trimming it again with scissors... :laugh:

[Tsorovan]

People who archive stuff just for the sake of ease of downloading (well...that's also debatable), especially files that can't be compressed more (avi, mpg, mp3, ogg, certain iso files (movies for instance)) should be shot, because they've never ever seen the "Store" option. Warez groups are the worst.

End of rant.

[DanaPaul]

just for the sake of ease of downloading (well...that's also debatable

Password protection
Directory structures (Group by album)

Archive utilities that I've used (WinZip, ZLib) default to the "store" option when it detects a file that can't be compressed given the current compression rate.  Have you seen the size of some of these MP3 tags?  The majority of them duplicate IDv3 and IDv2.  Speaking of Tags, who wrote the crap that folks are using to create these tags?  

My 2 cents.

[Tsorovan]

Well, I loathe the ID3 tag concept anyway...the only thing it manages to do is making people lazy and not naming files correctly, which then makes it a bitch trying to find/easily see what artist and what album and what title and what-have-you this particular MP3 on your harddrive is. So that point is moot, AFAIK.

That automatic store thing in WinZip doesn't work half of the time. Also, people are still using that shitty program? I thought everyone switched to WinRAR years ago, WinRAR has even better zip compression that WinZip, which is sad :\
In the illegal world (ahem), RAR is the standard, and those damn retards still haven't found the compression drop-down list. :(

Anyway, a bit off-topic I guess, and I apologize for bringing it up.

[Tsorovan]

Oh, and what good is password protection really? I mean it takes 2 seconds to break it.

[Pike84]

Well, I loathe the ID3 tag concept anyway...the only thing it manages to do is making people lazy and not naming files correctly, which then makes it a bitch trying to find/easily see what artist and what album and what title and what-have-you this particular MP3 on your harddrive is. So that point is moot, AFAIK.

I have a bit different view to this. I'm pretty fond of ID3 tags because of all the info that can be put there - I hate it when people make these >100 character filename monsters, instead of simply putting it into the tag. I think that is improper naming if something. I always name my files like 'artist - songname'. If people want more info beforehand, then it can surely be found on the net.

[Zarggg]

I suppose I'm a little anal, since I use a directory stucture of C:\music\<artistFirstLetter>\<artist>\<album>\<artist> - <songName>.ogg, compounded with Ogg tags.  I can't stand the MP3 codec OR the ID3 tagging system that everyone loves to (ab)use. :laugh:

As for the discussion of archiving vs. compressing, if all I wanted to do was archive several files into a single managable file, I'd use a flipping tarball.  ZIP and RAR are for compression.

[Alexsource]

Well, that .zip actually has a bunch of .mo3 alongside info on eachone (.htmls, gif, descriptions, and such). Sorry for not saying so before
Now, i downloaded 2.7 and tryed it out, but it seems to hate that .zip even more than 2.6 had...
so, i decompressed the files, and them recompresed them, once with winzip and once with winrar, so i had two files (mm.zip and mm.rar) plus the original one.
xmplay loaded the.rar just as fine. But when i tryed to load the new .zip i created, it crashed . I'm even more confused than at the begining, but well...
Hey ian, if you want to take a look at this .zip, i can upload it to you. (or if you want, you can download it y'self, but it's quite heavy, 30 megs or so, i would have no trouble in uploading it as i have cable)

[Ian @ un4seen]

Redownload 2.7, it should be ok now

[Tsorovan]

Off-topic for those care (probably not many :D):

I use:
x:\Artist - Album (year of original release_release) [quality]\track number - Title.suffix

(Actually, I use · instead of - separating artist/album and track number/title for legibility and some obscure parsing reasons I won't go into here)

A little example:

d:\MP3\Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band · Bluejeans and Moonbeams (1974) [256F]\04 · Pompadour Swamp.mp3

And no, it's not my rip, I would never use Fraunhofer.

[Torkell]

Tarballs aren't all that much good under Win32, where ZIP is kinda the norm (and there are programs other than WinZIP that will handle ZIPs, like PKZIP and StuffIT). Of course, *nix is a different matter (if I remember right, with *nix you can only put one file in a gzip archive, and tar doesn't do compression, so you end up compressing a tar).

[Alexsource]

Thanks Ian! it now works perfetly