0Full Flac support in Media Center x64

Fol­low­ing on from an [int­link id=“40” type=“post”]earlier article[/intlink], I have been con­tinu­ing to work on get­ting my music col­lec­tion work­ing in Win­dows 7 Media Cen­ter. The prob­lem I have had is that although there are codecs from xiph which sup­port play­back of flacs in 64bit play­ers ([int­link id=“14” type=“post”]see this post[/intlink]) there are (as far as I’m aware) no tag extenders com­pat­ible with 64bit.  After banging my head against a wall for ages I even­tu­ally had a breakthrough.

Installing the 32bit xiph codecs (altho I ima­gine the offi­cial FLAC codec and ffd­show will both work) and the tag extender WMPTag­Plus 1.1 I was able to build a lib­rary, play flacs and view and edit tags in Media Play­er 32bit (but not 64bit). It seems that Media Cen­ter uses the Media Play­er engine to play music, but it does­n’t seem to mind which Media Play­er it uses. In my case the default appears to be the 64bit play­er, which could­n’t read the tags. How­ever, I was able to switch this by renam­ing the 64bit play­er folder in C:Program Files (I renamed it to Win­dows Media Play­er 64) and then copy­ing the 32bit play­er from C:\Program Files (x86) to C:\Program Files. Since then Win­dows Media Cen­ter has hap­pily used the 32 bit Win­dows Media Play­er to play back and man­age the tags of my flacs.

Whilst this works great, in the longer term I hope someone releases a 64bit tag extender so I can return to using the 64bit play­er and being purely 64bit again.