Mitch Friedfeld <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>When your media player of choice spins up a CD, it portrays on screen
>the track numbers, name of song, even album art.  A few months ago I
>discovered that a Thomas Hampson CD I have was incorrectly labeled:
>instead of the piano versions of the Kindertotenlieder and Rueckert
>songs, it had a different Hampson disc.  No damage.
>
>I am right now listening to disc 4 of the American String Quartet's
>Mozart cycle.  The album art portrays a group called Mozart.  Among
>the songs featured are Three Strikes Again, Static (D.J.), and Fortress
>Around Your Heart.  The album art, which shows the band behind a burning
>candelabra and in front of a purple-glitter background, would probably
>not have occurred to Wolfgang.  No damage here either.

I presume your media player of "choice" is Windows Media Player on
a Windows 2000 or XP system?  (I don't call that much of a "choice",
myself.) In any case, you are enjoying the fruits of the CDDB Internet
data base, a collaborative effort with the pitfalls inherent thereto,
and no way to opt out of using it.  Not to mention that I've never gotten
the hang of selecting tracks, etc.

There was a fine little application called cdplayer.exe, available on
Windows 98 and Windows NT machines.  It was small and compact, easy to
use, and played CD's with no muss or fuss.  It didn't have access to
Internet CD data bases; you had to type the information in yourself and
it got stored in a file on your hard drive called cdplayer.ini.  But
once it was there, it was there, and to your liking.

(The Win98 version cannot handle more than a certain number of bytes of
data in cdplayer.ini, but the WinNT version appears to have no such
limit.)

When I was compelled to upgrade from NT to XP, I was quite disappointed
in Microsoft "progress" in the CD playing area.  Fortunately, I discovered
that others had found that if you could salvage your old cdplayer.exe
from an NT machine, it would run on your XP machine just fine, which is
what I did.  Outside of the fact that I can't keep cdplayer.exe active
but must launch it after inserting the CD of my choice, I find that I
can be as happy as before with my real "choice" of CD players and CD
information display.

Somehow I found that I could live without the animated drug-induced
colorful visual displays of Media Player.  So be it.

Steve Bacher