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[pclivingood]

Wierd error using 11.0.268:

I have a computer with two soundcards.  One soundcard is connectred to the home stereo and the other to cheap computer speakers.  I have two zones set up in Media Center.  They are identical, but each directs output to a different soundcard.  The default zone is to the soundcard going to the home stereo.  This has worked well for the last few months under MC10 and 11.

But today, a friend gave me some m4p music files.  I added them to a playlist with some regular mp3 files in the start.  While the mp3 files were playing output was (correctly) to the soundcard connected to the home stereo.  But when the m4p file started, it magically started playing to the other soundcard.  It has never done this for any other music file (mp3 or wma) I have used.

This is definitely unexpected and buggy behavior.

Any ideas?

[JimH]

For the m4p tracks, MC is probably using the Quicktime playback engine.  I'm not sure whether you can choose your soundcard for QT.

[pclivingood]

That might make a little bit of sense since the other sound card (to the crappy speakers) is the system default.  Still, that behavior is really unintuitive and unexpected from a user's PoV.  It would be great if you could find a way to tell QuickTime to direct the output to the correct soundcard.  If you can't do that, it might be a good idea to pop up some sort of warning box to the user to describe why this really unexpected behavior is happening.

[Alex B]

I had a similar situation with m4a files. Besides the sound card selection problem I wanted to analyze and tag the files properly. Since I too had only a few files I converted them to Monkey's Audio format. Because it's a lossless format it didn't reduce audio quality like transcoding to any of the lossy formats would have done. The APE files are bigger, but it doesn't matter in my case.

The .m4p file name extension is used with protected Apple Music Store files. I don't think you can convert them, but it should be possible to burn them to an audio CD-R/W disc. I am not sure if MC can do it, but at least Apple's own program can. After burning you could rip them in APE format and include in your MC library if you like to.