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[edbro]

Hi, I did a fresh install of XP today and now I can't play any Flac files in MC. I installed the latest flac dlls into the plugin directory but MC tells me that I don't have the proper "Direct Show Filters", whatever those are. I can't tag any flac files either.

Can anybody tell me what I need? The files play perfectly in my other player (XmPlay). I used to play them fine in MC before the reinstall.

Thanks,
MC 11.1.89

[Alex B]

Try to reinstall the FLAC input and encoder plugins directly from here: http://accessories.jrmediacenter.com/mediacenter/accessories.php. Select the correct OS and MC version. Reboot after installing.

Also, scthom has just released a new version of the FLAC decoder. It is not yet on the plugin page, but you may want to try it too.

Hiya all and Happy Holidays!!!

I've posted Decoder plugin version 1.4.0 on my website -- http://members.cox.net/scot.thompson.  The only change has been to fix the problem with tags with extended characters.  I fixed the UTF8 encoding, so please give it a try and see if it fixes your problems.  It seemed to fix mine here.

[edbro]

Thanks, I think the problem is that I needed to register the dlls?? I installed from inside of MC and all is well.

[scthom]

Sounds like you are correct.

It's not sufficient to just download the dlls into your plugins directory.  You need to tell MC about them either by registering them directly (e.g. regsvr32 In_FLAC.dll) or by using the plugin manager to do it.  It's easier to let MC do it.

[GreggP]

I purchased/downloaded an album from Magnatunes (www.magnatunes.com) with all tracks in the Flac format. I've only downloaded a few albums from this site and the previous downloads were uncompressed WAV files. Since the file size was better, I chose the Flac format to save time. The rest of my music has been ripped to lossless WMA, so I will probably convert these Flacs to lossless WMA once I get this figured out.

The problem is, I also can't get Media Center (1.1.178) to play or transcode these Flac files. I downloaded both the Flac encoder and decoder. Using the Plug-in Manager, I see that FLAC Encoder v1.6.0 and flac decoder v1.3.0 are installed. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling. I also restarted both Media Center and rebooted my system and I still can't play or transcode these Flac files.

[Alex B]

Try the latest versions.

MC 11.1.185 from this forum and in_FLAC v. 1.6.5 from here: http://mcplugins.sourceforge.net/

Edit

If the filenames contain special characters try changing the names. A semicolon issue has been reported here: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=33934.0

[GreggP]

Okay, I downloaded and installed both MC 11.1.185 and In_FLAC-V1.6.5 and it still doesn't work.

[GreggP]

I also noticed that the duration or bitrate isn't displayed in the track list. So I tried the audio analysis tool. Then I got the message:

"Only audio files on a local drive that can be played in the native playback engine can be analyzed. (9 file(s) could not be added)"

All my tracks are located on a media server that I share across the network. Is this why these won't play? If this is the case, it is a pretty serious limitation of using decoder plugins. And, they really should improve their error handling. When I double click on one of the FLAC files (or select and pick Play) it doesn't do anything - no error message, nothing. That's not good, but it least it's not crashing.

There aren't any special characters in the filenames (ex. 01-Survival.flac), but the path includes '\\' and '\' of course.

[Alex B]

So you have not tried local playback and/or changing the path yet?

Please try, and report also the exact filename paths if that was the problem. Scthom would need that info for fixing the problem.


Edit

One thing you could try is to map a drive letter. Perhaps the decoder has a problem with double backslashes.

[GreggP]

I just copied the FLAC files to the local drive and imported them into Media Center. This time they are recognized and will play.

I also tried deleting these from the library and then re-importing the FLAC files on the network share. Now Media Center won't even import the files off the networked media server.

At least I have a work-around that lets me import the files from a local drive. Now I can convert them to lossless WMA.

[GreggP]

Actually, they won't convert to lossless WMA from Flac. Might be due to the fact that I installed the WMP11 beta just to check it out. Anyhow, I'll mention that in a new thread.

[Alex B]

Perhaps this is not your best day...

The "WMP 11 beta" issue is already reported here: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=33914.0. It seems that the only cure is to uninstall WMP 11 beta and the new WM codec pack.

BTW, your FLAC problem is probably not caused by the double backslashes. I can play FLAC files directly from various network shares without problems.

[GreggP]

I'm not sure why I'm having trouble over the network. Do the FLAC dlls have to be registered on the server as well?

Anyhow, I'm not too bothered by all of this since I've figured out a workaround. I also downloaded the WAVs from Magnatune, so I have those to work with as well.

OT. -I wanted to check out the WMP11 beta because I was told by some Microsoft people at CES earlier this year that WMP11 was much faster with large databases. I've always found WMP and iTunes to be pretty slow on my system (I have over 27,000 tracks), that's one of the reasons why I use MC. Anyhow, I wanted to see if WMP11 was an improvement. Well... it only took about 4 days to import my collection. Now that everything is imported, it does seem a little faster than WMP10, but still pretty dog slow when compared to JRMC11. Now I'll have to uninstall it. aarrgggg.