ERROR when playing protected WMA files in Hoster

[jlc_drummer]

I am using XP Home, just loaded 2.219 and it loads WMA files into the play list and shows READY, but some will not play and show ERROR in the status line. Others play fine. All loaded to the hard drive with Media Player. AMD 1800+ processor, 512MB ram, Sound Blaster Live card.

[Beavis]

did you try playing the ones that dont play in hoster in your media player ??

maybe the song is bad!

[jlc_drummer]

Yeah, everything plays fine in Media Player and it tends to be entire albums, so if a song plays in Hoster, all songs from that album play, if the ERROR status comes up, all songs from that album show ERROR

[gpayne]

I had the same problem! I found that WMA files that I downloaded from MusicMatch music service were content protected. Hoster would not play them. I verified this by taking a non content protected MP3 file and converting it to a WMA file. When I loaded the file converted to WMA from MP3 into Hoster, it worked perfectly. I guess if we buy downloaded content protected WMA files we will not be able to play them in hoster. I wonder if MTU would care to comment on this!

Hope this helps

gpayne

[gpayne]

I just took all of my content protected, downloaded, paid for WMA files and ripped them into Windows Media Player as WMA lossless files. I had burned all of them to a cd disk. I loaded one of them in hoster and it played perfectly. I don't think hoster can import a protected file. You can burn them to CDG's then rip them into Windows Media Player as WMA files and hoster will load them.

gpayne

P.S. There is probably no way hoster could load content protected files because it would have to decipher them.

[admin]

Hey... thanks for pointing this out. We'll take a look at if we can play content protected WMA songs on the same computer.

[jlc_drummer]

Thanks for all the feedback so far - these are all imported from my CD collection rather than Music Match downloads- is there something I should be doing different when I rip them to the hard drive?

[gpayne]

I don't know what version of WMP you are using, I am using Version 10. There is a checkbox in the tools/options/rip music settings box that has to do with protection. If that box was checked when you ripped the CD's the resulting WMA's could be copy protected on your hard drive. Other than that I am not sure what it would be. Hoster is pretty straight forward. I did notice that the WMA's that I tried to import that would not play had some astronomical number in the duration field.

gpayne

[MTUSUPPORT]

Jlc,
What program are you using to Rip the Songs into the Computer? Also, it may help for you to email me one of the songs that will not play for you, so that I can pass it alone to the Engineer for him to take a look at it.

You can email me at support on this Page: http://www.mtu.com/support/contact-mtu.htm

[jlc_drummer]

I used WMP 9 - I don't remember there being any toggle for protection, I am going to try loading WMP 10 and see how it goes - if that doesn't solve it I will let you all know.

[jlc_drummer]

O.K. - I loaded WMP 10 and it clearly identifies protected files (ie. MusicMatch downloads) All of my files ripped from CD show NO for protection, yet the majority of them are showing ERROR when I try to play in Hoster. I ripped them using WMP 9. I tried ripping one with WMP 10 and it still shows ERROR. I will try to get a file sent to tech support by the end of the week- but it sounds like it is just something unique to my computer. Thanks again for the feedback.

[Wayne White]

I can't play my WMA files either. I have tried about 20 & only 1 would play. They say Ready and then go to Error when I click play. Some of them put the time in the playlist, but, don't put the song name. All of my music came from original CDs & was ripped with Windows Media Player. Copy protection was turned off. I can play these saongs on this computer with WIndows Media Player & Mix Meister Pro 4.

How many people have tried to play WMA files & are not having a problem? Is it just those of us who posted who are having problems? Are we the only ones who have tried?

Wayne

[jlc_drummer]

I e-mailed an ERROR producing wma file to MTU support and have heard back that the file plays perfectly for them in Hoster, so it is definitely something on my machine- I will try some various re-installs and see if I can get things on the right track.

[Wayne White]

I think I figured the problem out, but, I am not crazy about the solution.

I think the problem is the length of the PATH to the song. When I imported my music using Windows Media Player, I put the music in a folder in a folder :/My Music/Wma Files/.

Media player put in 2 more folders - 1 for the Artist & 1 for the Album. So now we have C:My Music/WMA Files/Blood Sweat and Tears/Blood Sweat And Tears Greatest Hits/Lacretia Macevil.wma

The songs that play have short names & a short artist name. So far every song I have copied to the My Music Folder with just the Song Name will play. I have over 15,000 songs on my drive and wouldn't want to do this for all of them, but, we don't play alot of Dance Songs during our Karaoke shows (If I can just figure out which ones to copy in a simple directory).

Of course resolving the problem would be great, if MTU can verify that this is actually what is causing the problem.

Wayne

[jlc_drummer]

BINGO. I double checked the file I sent MTU - still ERROR - I copied just the song to a different folder and it plays fine. It is still in C:/Program Files/MTU/Hoster/WMA/song.wma but it came from C:/Documents and Settings/Jeff/Desktop/My Music/Non-Island/Artist/Album/song.wma So somewhere between 4 subdirectories and 7 subdirectories there is a breaking point. Easy enough to copy any tunes I want to use into a separate hoster directory and if push came to shove I could do it on the fly. Thanks Wayne and thanks to tech support and now MTU has some information it can use to put this one to bed.

[Wayne White]

Actually my path in my original email was wrong. It closely resembles yours. Since I opened the file form 'My Documents', I omitted part of the path, it's actually C:\Documents and Settings\Wayne.DESKTOP\My Documents\WMA Songs\My Music\Aaron Neville\The Very Best of Aaron Neville\Song.wma

Hopefully MTU can verify whether this is really the problem & get a fix made.

You're right, this is a fairly easy work around, but, I don't want to wreck my entire file system to play a few songs when I can just switch over to my DJ program. I will probably copy the current popular dance tracks to a flat file & leave the originals in place.

Wayne

[gduns - with the Lord]

SUGGESTION,
When I started using media player, and Put them in the default directory like you guys did. But I wanted to be able to use them in my laptop also. so I put them in a directory off the root called music. so the path would now be C:\Music\Aaron Neville\The Very Best of Aaron Neville\Song.wma
In windows media player it didnt change anything as the playlist goes back one directory and looks forward.

I put tham on a usb drive, and also put it in the root. on my laptop I had it search for media files, and gave it the path. it found all the playlists, music, and icons etc. and they all work well that way.

[MTUSUPPORT]

This makes since, the .wma file that Dlc_Drummer sent me I copied into a folder named D:\Songlist\WMA file that Won't play in Hoster\Ain't No Sunshine Lean on Me- The Best of Bill Withers.wma and it played fine.

This could be the issue is that the path that Microsoft allows the Dialog to go down is limited to a certain number of characters.

[jlc_drummer]

It is the number of characters rather than sub directories. I put a new folder on my C drive and copied a song to it, so it was C:/(very long folder name)/song.wma and it triggered the ERROR message in Hoster. Plays fine in WMP 10.

[gduns - with the Lord]

Yes, you are limited to 256 characters, including spaces. But I also noticed an Illegal character in the path name a "." is not allowed in a path name. only as in a filename

C:\Documents and Settings\Wayne.DESKTOP\My Documents\WMA Songs\My Music\Aaron Neville\The Very Best of Aaron Neville\Song.wma