I've been playing with Home Theater PC software
for a couple years. I settled on Windows Media Center Edition as my
platform a few months back.
It isn't the best, but it is the easiest. It works out of the box, and
has a great remote preconfigured. I got tired of fiddling, and wanted an
appliance that just worked. MCE discourages fiddling, because it isn't as
configurable as other packages.
The one drawback for me in using MCE is that all my personal CDs are ripped as
iTunes AAC files. Actually, every HTPC front end I tried had this
drawback, so it wasn't unique to MCE. Fortunately, MCE uses the media
library from Windows Media Player. Getting WMP to play AAC files is a
snap using the
3ivx codec.
The trouble begins when you want to see tag info. You won't see any
artist, album or track info after you add the files to WMP's
library. In fact, you may find your AAC files in the "Other
Media" ghetto... er, I mean node.
So here's the fix I worked out: Remove all AAC (.m4a) files from your WMP
library. Apply the m4a.reg registry patch linked below. Add the AAC
files into your WMP library. At this point you should be ready to run my
little import app, but there's a caveat.
If your music is on a network drive, you need to be sure that it is added to
iTunes using the UNC path. (e.g. \\computer\share) WMP will add the files
mapped this way even if you have the share mapped to a local drive. Since
I use the fully qualified file name as my means of relating the tracks in both
libraries, this gave me some trouble.
The program (iTunes2WMP.exe) included in the .zip file below doesn't actually
enable WMP to read the tags in AAC files. It reads the relevant
information (artist, album, etc.) about a file out of the iTunes library, and
then writes it into the WMP library. The result is the same as if WMP had
read the tags directly.
I didn't set out to write a program to do this. I tried two utilities
that I downloaded (from a forum that shall remain unnamed), and they both
sucked. Not only did they not work for me, but the code was embarrassing
to read. When I don't know what I'm doing, I try to copy someone who
does. I can only assume that these people don't realize that they don't
know what they are doing.
I wrote this utility in C# 2.0 because I wanted to try out some of the features
of the new release. I can report that code snippets are a terrific
productivity boost in Visual Studio 2005, but the real super-duper feature for
2.0 is generics. I created a strongly typed dictionary with one line of
code, and I assure you that I did not know what I was doing when I
started. It's just that easy. .NET generics are THE BOMB!
"Stone guaranteed to blow your mind" as James Taylor would say.
If you use this utility, I'd like to hear your comments. I don't promise
to make any improvements. That's why you have the source. I would
just like to know if others find it useful.
++Alan
PS: The following files are provided without warranty, or assurance of
fitness for any purpose. They could melt your synapses, give you
bird flu or worse, crash your system. If they do, I'm not
responsible. Got it?
iTunes2WMP.zip (68.03 KB) m4a.reg.txt (.66 KB)