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Playing iTunes .m4a files in Windows media player
As part of setting up my Vista PC I decided to overhaul my music library. I wanted to sync things in to my iPod, but I had most of my stuff ripped as WMA files. That means iTunes wants to convert everything to its own format, so I get two copies of everything.
iTunes native format is .m4a, which won't play in WMA, so to have the choice of WMP or iTunes means having everything twice (and I quite like the new media player in Vista).
I'm trying out a combination of two programs that seem to make it work. Firstly, a codec from 3ivx. That adds the necessary code to allow Windows media player handle the iTunes mpeg format. There are various packages, but if you go to the 3ivx store you can use the which version is right for you section to get the personal download and it's only a few dollars. There are more comprehensive packages if you want to encode too, but for playback just the personal version is fine.
Having installed it WMP can then play iTunes files (and will start adding them to the library too). However, it doesn't let WMP read the tag data, so the files just get displayed with their filename.
A second piece of software, WMP Tag Support Extender fixes this. From what I've seen so far it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. It probably gets about 90% of the info right. Enough that it's not been too much of a problem so far to fix the duff entries.
I'm not sure how good it would be at handling an existing library, but it's fine for picking up CDs as I rip them or download new iTunes stuff. There are usually only a couple of entries where it doesn't get it quite right. The only "downside" is that when you view a folder containing iTunes music with Windows Explorer you don't see the artist/album info because the plug in only lets media player see the meta-data. It doesn't expose it to Explorer, but that's not too much of a hardship!
The advantage is that I now have one folder that contains all my audio files, and I can sync them to my iPod, play them in iTunes, or in WMP.
I found other references on the web that mentioned MusicBridge, a program that synchronises iTunes and Media Player. Maybe that's an option (instead of? or as well as WMPTSE?) I need to explore too :-)
Comments
The only "downside" is that
The only "downside" is that when you view a folder containing iTunes music with Windows Explorer you don't see the artist/album info because the plug in only lets media player see the meta-data. It doesn't expose it to Explorer, but that's not too much of a hardship!
I have written a shell extension for Windows (Vista) Explorer that shows the tags -- including the album art. See www.whitebear.ch/music for more details.
Note that my shell extension does also allow you to edit the tag values whereas WMP Tag Support Extender is read only.
In an ideal world a kind of merger between my shell extension and the WMP Tag Support Extender would allow tags -- and album art -- to be displayed -- and edited -- in both Windows Media Player and Windows Explorer...
MusicBridge is good!
I imported a dozen more CDs tonight, and was faced with tweaking the data in WMP again, so I decided try MusicBridge. It seems to have fired the data from iTunes to WMP very nicely, and taken the album art over as well, which saves more time!
It got confused by one compilation album and separated each track in to its own album (because each track was given the track artist as the album artist, so media player assumed them to be different albums) but a quick drag and drop seems to have cured it.
As a precaution I've switched off the WMP option to update the library with internet information, in case it tries to do weird stuff :-)
So now I just set up the albums in iTunes, port them to media player via the bridge, and can then play them in either! So on balance think I'm going to use MusicBridge in preference to WMPTSE.