ObfusCo > The List > mp3

MP3 Blog

• 7) How do you send anybody an album of MP3 files? Does MP3 define any kind of Table of Contents? Or do you end up with the files on your hard drive and in your player in alphabetical order? Maybe you have to name them with leading "01" "02" ... "10" "11" etc.? It all sucks as far as I've seen yet.
• 6) I have a directory with some MP3 files in it. WinAmp 3 utterly fails to play the files. It doesn't tell me why it fails, it just fails. Nice. Windows Media Player 9 has a few different ways to load the directory, not all of which actually work. Dragging and dropping all the files into the Player does get them listed.
• 5) I'm trying to burn some MP3 cds to play on my wacky DVD player, just for fun. Unfortunately:
  1. The ripper software didn't set the track numbers right. Everything appears as track # 32, so i had to manually update that attribute by right-clicking on the individual mp3 files in the File Explorer. That was fun!
  2. Of course, some song, album or artist titles have things like "&" or "/" in them, which completely doesn't work with NTFS. They just turn into spaces. Whatever.
  3. When I try to use the adaptec software to write the cd, it is totally broken and doesn't let me sort based on the track number attribute. I can see it, I can click on it's column header, but it just sorts them by name still. Yay.
  4. So I try the built-in WinXP CD burning stuff with the File Explorer. You'd think that since I was using it before to successfully look at the files and update their track numbers and view them in track sorted order everything would be fine. But nooo. Now when I try to copy the stuff over, at best it shows me them in crappy order like: 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3, 4,... (I guess as long as you have less than 10 songs you'd be fine. That's some pretty swank software feature, that!)
  5. Then, I go to play the MP3 CD on my Apex 600 DVD player. It is pretty funny; it apparently doesn't have lower case ASCII characters in its character set, nor apostrophes (they were converted into 'O's for some reason). My $160 or whatever I paid for it originally obviously didn't go toward the UI folks.
• 4) Seems like, on the parallel Earth where everything is better, CDDB would also have the lyrics and they would show up in the players.
• 3) WinAmp
  1. It is now crashing in like three different ways when I try to play a CD. It gets part way through then puts up some utterly inscrutable error dialog, and then terminates. Yes!
  2. WA3 has little buttons for tuning things on and off, e.g.: the graphic equalizer, or the auto-repeat of songs. The only thing which changes in the default skin when those toggle are like 4 pixels, which change between darkish green and lightish green. Here's a clue, you dumb clucks: that does not a good UI make.
  3. WinAmp 3 doesn't update the name of the album quickly enough. I play one CD, and then switch to another, and it is still showing the data for the CD title, songs, etc. from the first one! Here's a clue: if you can't get it from CDDB right away, at least blank out the old values. Lordy these kids are stupid. And, even if it does eventually update the data inside the window, the entry in the Task Bar gets updated at like the dawn of the next ice age.
  4. There is no telling what will happen when you click on what appears to be parts of the window that don't have any controls in them. It seems like the window is broken down internally into different frames. Depending on where you click, you might have nothing happen (which is what should happen in all cases, for crying out loud), or you might have a dialog suddenly appear in your face. Very annoying, especially when all you are trying to do is raise the bloody thing from behind some other window. People like this thing?
  5. The scrollbar in the play list window is a huge piece of stupid crap. It doesn't behave like any other proper scroll bar on earth. Hello?
  6. Could they make enabling CDDB a little more obscure? No.
  7. I'm not even going to start in on the whole skins thing.
  9. You can't choose how big the windows will be, other than double sizing them. Also, the play list window is always like half the size of the winamp window. The reason I double sized it in the first place was that the play list window was too small and the text too hard to read!
  10. Since I'm using Napster, I'd like the play list to have the option of just monitoring a directory and using it's contents as the play list. It looks to me that you can add things from a directory, but you can't, for example, only add the new things. I just want a refresh command.
  11. You can't turn off tooltips in the Preferences dialog???!!!
• 2) Napster
  1. So the red dots in the search results tell me I don't want to download those files. So there should be an option to not even show those results.
  2. Uh, I have to double check, but I think the Transfer interface is broken: when you right-click and choose Delete/Abort, I want it to remove the item I'm actually clicking on. It seems to kill whatever it thinks it's currently downloading, which isn't always clear to the user!
  3. Eh, pretty much the whole Transfer interface sucks. I want to be able to pause transfers. Canceling them totally removes them if I Clear Finished. I mean, what's the point having Delete/Abort, then, since they seem to do pretty much the same thing?
  4. When you double-click on a search result to begin downloading it, the screen switches to Transfer. That's annoying if you are going to be selecting a bunch of the results, because you have to keep manually switching back to Search.
  5. You should be able to sort your download ordering by connection type, so you get more songs more quickly.
  6. The search interface doesn't indicate if searches are exact or partial or what. The docs don't seem to say, either.
  7. The search doesn't seem to let you exclude artists, so you can find covers.
  8. It goes to all the trouble of doing a really long search, but then it doesn't cache the results in case you want to go back to a previous set of results to download another file. So you have to perform the search all over again which is slower for the user and also more of a burden on the networked system.
  9. If I'm interested in the filename, I'm generally interested in the end of the file name since that specifies the song. E.g.: I'm looking for a Depeche Mode song the title of which I don't know, so I search for all DM stuff. Then, I want to see what's at the end of the file name, since that is the song name. I guess the bottom line is that really there should have been a separation between the artist name and the song name in the results. There is in the search, so I'm not sure why it can't show that in the results since the search implies the database already makes the distinction.
• 1) I also have complaints about Microsoft's Windows Media Player.