Playing Audio CDs, part 3 - MCI

re: Playing Audio CDs, part 3 - MCI

Andrew — Tue, 03 May 2005 01:12:33 GMT

Cool series of articles.

Do you know if there any way to get the MCI interface to return the data track that is included in mixed mode CDs? This turns out to be important if you want to do a freedb lookup to get the track names.

Playing Audio CDs, part 4 - MCI Playback.

Larry Osterman's WebLog — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 18:35:52 GMT

The
other day, I wrote about dumping the track database on an audio using the
MCI string command...

re: Playing Audio CDs, part 3 - MCI

Larry Osterman [MSFT] — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 16:45:36 GMT

Steven,
That's why we brought it back. We realized that (a) a number of shipping apps would have a great deal of difficulty porting to 64bit platforms without it, and (b) it was the easiest way of performing a bunch of operation.

On the other hand, as I mentioned, most of the code was written for 16 bit windows and ported to Win32...

re: Playing Audio CDs, part 3 - MCI

Marcel — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 11:33:52 GMT

What always irritated me about MCI was that altough you can open and close the drive tray, there seems to be no way to determine whether it is currently opened or closed.
I had to port some DOS code once where this was an issue (the DOS drivers returned the status just fine) and only ended up equaling "drive tray is closed" with "disc is in drive".

re: Playing Audio CDs, part 3 - MCI

Steven Don — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 08:13:37 GMT

I've been using mci to play stuff like MIDI files for a long time now. It'd be terrible to see the API EOL-ed, because there just doesn't seem to be an easier way to play MIDIs (at least none that I'm aware of). DirectShow always seemed grossly overcomplicated for just playing a single MIDI file.

re: Playing Audio CDs, part 3 - MCI

Larry Osterman [MSFT] — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 04:49:23 GMT

The MCI APIs should be available for 64bit apps on the final x64 bits.

Dirty little secret: At one point we believed we could end-of-life them for 64bit platforms (changing processor architectures is just about the only opportunity that we have to remove old APIs like this one, since changing processor architectures requires that a new version of the application be released), unfortunately we realized relatively late in the process that we needed to continue to support them.

It's possible that some beta bits were released that came from the interim builds where we'd removed the APIs.

re: Playing Audio CDs, part 3 - MCI

Drew — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 01:45:16 GMT

Looks like those APIs were ported from 16 bit and not available on 64 bit Windows. Any interesting history?

re: Playing Audio CDs, part 3 - MCI

Kris — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 00:38:02 GMT

Wonderful articles. These go into my Code Pearls collection. Just wondering if you would be kind enough to post some code in the future as to how to play an URL programmatically. I listen to a lot of talk radio online and I would like to write an app to start playing the program automagically at a specified time.