Songs Of Distant Earth (with Macintosh data track)

[Felix Atagong]

This must perhaps be the strangest 'bug' report and I'm only aware of 1 cd out of a million that has this particularity. I have The Songs Of Distant Earth by Mike Oldfield, the original 'enhanced 'version that starts with a Mac cd-rom track. The following tracks all contain cd music tracks.
Songs-db refuses to scan or play this cd because apparently the first Macintosh track is not recognised as a PC or a Windows file. Also Windows Explores or 2xExplorer refuse (obviously) to recognise the cd.

But!, Windows MediaPlayer recognises the cd immediately, skips the cd-rom track and happily starts playing at track 2. I don't want you to change your program for this freaky cd, just wanted to tell you what happened.

Good Luck with the betas!

Felix

NP: The Songs From Distant Earth - Mike Oldfield

[rusty]

Felix, thx for the feedback--I just noticed another CD with the same problem: Salah McLachlan - Surfacing...

-Rusty

[Felix Atagong]

I found another cd that has a home movie track and refuses to play with Songs-db. Checking it with 2xExplorer gives the following datastructure:
Ikoon.ico
Swoon.exe
Autorun.inf
and a directory called DATA containing:
Swoon.avi
Main.dxr
and not a sign of any CDA files.

But Windows Media Player does recognise the cd and puts in the songtitles etc... As more and more cd's come with these extra's, it would maybe be nice if Songs-DB would recognise cda files on 'mixed media' cd's in the future, perhaps using an I'm pretty sure this cd contains some cda tracks, so let's get looking for that!-option.

NP: Zita Swoon - Life=A Sexy Santuary (limited and enhanced version)

[rusty]

This situation has been improved somewhat in beta 4, though I neglected to mention it because it's not yet completely fixed. If you insert the CD, and look in the 'My Computer' node, chances are you won't see the tracks of the enhanced CD.

But, if you add the CD to your library, then you should be able to see and play all of the tracks.

Let me know if this works.

[Guest]

1. Mike Oldfield - The Songs Of Distant Earth (mac)
cd is not recognised by windows (due to the starting mac track) and gives following error in Songs-DB: Problem with scanning directory D:\. Windows Media Player has no problem with it, so I guess there is a solution somewhere...

2. Zita Swoon - Life etc... (windows)
adding the tracks to the database works, I see them now, playing gives following error in album node: Tracks from the following CDs cannot be played until the cd is inserted, if I push ignore, the cd starts playing.

3. Kraftwerk - Tour de France 1983 (cd-extra with remixes and video, this cd is automatically recognised by XP as an audio cd and not as a video cd. The multi-media content has to be installed first and contains a MOV file.)
Putting in the cd popped up the XP screen to choose Songs-DB as the dedicated cd player. After pressing OK I got the following error due to the record that I had put in before: 2. Zita Swoon Hot Hotter Hottest - Songs-DB. Access violation of address 0F8E2E1E in module 'f_ogg.dll'. Read of address:00000000. Pressing OK and adding the tracks of Kraftwerk to the database gives the error as above (cfr point 2). Ignoring it starts playing the tracks.

4. Kraftwerk - Expo 2000 (enhanced cd).
5. K's Choice - Not an addict (promotional sampler)
6. dEUS - The Ideal Crash (promotional sampler).
7. Various - Humo presenteert (5 track promotional sampler with Internet installation program)
Same as above. All can import the tracks in the database and all can be played after 'ignoring' the initial error window.

So this seems to work in Songs-DB, although fooling around with these mixed media cd's has completely f***ed up my soundcard and keyboard and I will have to restart my pc after this last cd will have finished... and guess what happens just now: Win32 error: 0x45d. CD reader error. I blame the cd's, not Songs-db!

[Felix Atagong]

That previous post was written by me, of course...

[Remco Raaphorst]

Hi,

Does it help if you hold <shift> while and after (a second of 5) inserting the CD. This way you'll bypass the autorun feature of windows and it helped me a lot with mixed mode cd's (I'm using EAC for audio grabbing and mp3 encoding and it has the same problems).

[Felix Atagong]

Does it help if you hold <shift> while and after (a second of 5) inserting the CD. This way you'll bypass the autorun feature of windows and it helped me a lot with mixed mode cd's.

Of course, I didn't think of that. BTW, it may come as a pleasant surprise to you Rusty and Jiri that it probably was QuickTime (or whatever it's called) that messed my settings around, it doesn't repond at all to my multi-media keyboard... and they call themselves professionals...

[Felix Atagong]

Just tried to add some 'copy protected cd's' through Songs-DB and they are recognised, using the instructions of a few messages ago. 'Ignoring' the error message, plays the cd as well!

edit at 27th of July: but it gives an I/O error though on the last track - the cd cover says that the track takes 01:39 but Songs-DB reads it 04:16. After 1 minute and 43 seconds Songs-DB ghives following error: Win Amp - CD reader - Error. Win32 error: 0x45d (error in I/O), it must be the last track that contains data instead of music, I guess.

I'm now trying to provoke the same error with: Kraftwerk - Tour de France 2003.

[Felix Atagong]

Yep, same error at approx 2:30 of the end. I don't think you can do something about that, can you? Although WMP gives the right songlength (7:44) while songs-db gives (wrongly) 10:16.