October 22nd 2008 09:04 pm
Taglib Property Handler
Tonight marks the first public release of Taglib Property Handler, an Explorer extension for Vista that allows it to read metadata from many audio file types:
Currently, it’s fully read-only, so there’s minimal risk to your data, and the default install doesn’t cause you to lose any existing functionality.
The list of supported properties shows what the default handler supports for MP3 and WMA, and what TLPH supports so far.
This release comes after four months of swearing at Microsoft for the entire property handler system being impossible to debug. Four months ago I had the handler working in Windows Explorer, but Windows Search would refuse to show any properties it provided. There’re plenty of articles on debugging this situation, which I ran through hundreds of times, in the end this turned out to be caused by:
- Explorer accepting VT_BSTR and Windows Search not; solved by switching to InitPropVariantFromString.
- Stupid mistakes with pointers. Oh, how I hate you.
2 Comments »
Setaou on 22 Dec 2009 at 5:31 pm #
Thanks for this very useful piece of software ! I was looking for that for ages, and I only find it now. It works like a charm under windows 7 x64 ! Keep up the good work !
Peter on 15 Feb 2010 at 6:42 pm #
Great add-on.
I especially like the fact that I can now search my MP3 collection on bitrates. I found a huge amount of MP3′s below 96 kbs and this tool is now my bets friend.
Could you perhaps popup a window at the end of the install routine, to display all the property values and perhaps a “basic” short tutorial on how to use. Screenshots are not always good in transfering intentions.
Good work.