Hello All. This is my first post. I hope I am posting this in the right forum. 

I have a couple of questions. 

1. M4A Support in W7MC and WMP12: During the public beta, WMP recognized all my m4a files, some of which were encoded in AAC and some of which were in ALAC (Apple Lossless). But WMP/W7MC could not play ALAC files out of the box. Therefore in the RC, the behaviour was changed such that only supported files in the M4A container were imported into the library. As most of you know, enabling ALAC support in W7MC/WMP12 is as straightforward as installing any of the available Quicktime DirectShow Filters. But now, even though WMP12 can recognize all the metadata in the m4a Lossless file, it refuses to add it to the library. Is there a way I can go back to the Beta's behaviour of importing m4a (Apple Lossless) files even though it can't play them by default?

2. Contributing Artists in Windows 7 Media Center (W7MC?) - In the W7MC, the music library gives you a lot of views to browse through your Music Library. The two views that I am concerned are <artists> and <album artists> views. I had expected that <artists> view would use the "Contributing Artist" tag (hence providing support for multiple artists) and <album artists> view would support "Album Artist" tag. However, it looks like both those views use the same tag, i.e. "Album Artist". Is this behaviour intended? If so, is there a way to browse using Contributing Artists. Something like customize navigation pane in WMP12?

Any help would be appreciated. 

Anyone please?

These features were working earlier in the Beta.

 Can someone tell me if I can replace some of the dlls from the older build to enable this functionality?

 

I too have noticed that ALAC .m4a files are not being imported into the "Music Library". I'm on Windows 7 x64 RC2 build 7201. I set the root of my Music Library to the iTunes folder and these ALAC files are skipped. However, I can play back the ALAC file - in the 32bit version of wmplayer with a Quicktime plugin. Its just not being added to the library. I would be interested in a fix to add .m4a ALAC files to the music library. There must be a registry tweak to add alac as a valid library type. Who knows where to look in the registry?

 

Rename the file to .mp4 and the file will be imported and shown in the library. That's the best workaround I could come up with.

-Kiran

No one's found a better solution to this problem?

I'd like to keep the files as m4a so i don't mess with my itunes setup.

WMP12 plays M4A ALAC files fine. They just appear under "other media" and don't appear under the music library where the meta data can be shown.

Any help would be appreciated

stormking

There must be a registry tweak to add alac as a valid library type. Who knows where to look in the registry?

 

Have a look under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and click on the ALAC file extension (.m4a?).

See what the Content Type and PerceivedType values are set to in the right hand pane.

I don't use ALAC files, but if you put a link up to a file then I'll take a look.

Has anyone had any luck with this?  I too am looking to have ALAC play and populate in both W7MC & WMP12.

VMCPC SD

Has anyone had any luck with this?  I too am looking to have ALAC play and populate in both W7MC & WMP12.

I have not seen any solutions mentioned yet myself, other than changing the file extension which screws up iTunes. It seems Microsoft have yet again gone out of their way to screw things up. As the person who was the instigator of the original DirectShow filter that lets WMP play Apple Lossless I am rather pissed at this. The only other approach I have seen that does work is the rather nasty and desperate one of installing a hacked WMP11 over WMP12. This did let me successfully add Apple Lossless tracks to WMP11 under Windows7 and play them and see them properly in the music section. I did not test whether this would still work with W7MC. I currently still use MediaCenter 2005 and had planned to at some point move to W7MC, but I now might (ugh!) instead move to Vista Media Center with the TV Pack and a hacked H.264 codec. With this I would still be able to run WMP11 properly rather than the deliberately crippled WMP12 that Microsoft have foisted on poor unsuspecting Windows7 users.

It's been more than a year and there are no proper solutions for this. Either most people don't have ALAC or no one cares except a minority. 

There is one more solution that you can try. However, this would involve having a separate music folder for WMP/7MC and a separate for iTunes Music. 

Create a script that lists all the files with mp3 and m4a within iTunes folder and creates a hardlink to these files in a different folder and WMP/7MC is configured to point to the second folder.