So Media Center already looks in cdplayer.ini to try to find information about a particular CD before querying the net. That's nice and all, but CDPlayer.ini is way obsolete - it doesn't store nearly the same level of data as modern library tools (ie composer / performer data for each track), and really isn't used by any serious programs any more.
Windows Media Player now caches all of it's data in a file such as
C:\Documents and Settings\{USER}\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media PlayerCurrentDatabase_59R.wmdb (WMP9)
or
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Index\wmplibrary_v_0_12.db (WMP7-8)
From what I've been able to tell, these files, while still binary in nature, seem to contain unicode text with all of the album cache data as XML. So in theory it should be possible for MC to use this data.
It would be very cool if Media Center could look in either of these files to try and dig up album information, before checking online. The WMP online database seems very complete, so it would be nice to cache down some of that data with WMP first so that MC will recognize the CD when I go to rip it.
On a more general note, does the MC plugin architecture make it possible to write a plugin that would handle how CD information is retreived? If so, I'll have to look into this, otherwise I would definitely recommend making it an option so that the community could write their own plugins to support different local dbs (like the wmp one mentioned here) or different online dbs (like freedb).
--Tim
Author
Topic: Sharing Windows Media Player CD cache (Read 995 times)