External player with playlist --- show the song name?

[eli2k]

I have the player settings set to "External player with playlist" which makes each song in the Subsonic playlist a playlist item, and saves it as a M3U file. If I load this playlist into foobar, it will load all the playlist items, but there is not artist/track information, just a long URL. If I start to stream the song, it won't reveal the artist/track at all. Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Should I be able to see the song information? Song information shows up with External player, but I'd like to control the music from inside foobar. Thanks.

[aplus01]

I'm running into the same issue. I'm running portable foobar2K v1.0. Did you ever find a fix for this?

[eli2k]

Nah, no response from anybody, yet.

[aplus01]

have you had any luck getting this resolved?

on a whim i decided to try a portable version of winamp to see if it fared any better than foobar. tried out winamp 5.572 and i get a playlist that is legible until the track starts playing at which point the track info is replaced with:

stream?player=3&pathUtf8Hex=4...

its weird that it loads correctly at first.

[aplus01]

Looks like the issue is with the way LAME encoder is being called to down sample. When I turn off down sampling (i.e. set max bitrate to "No Limit") things run as expected and tags are displayed correctly.

Sindre - can you add the necessary info to the call to LAME when down sampling?

Found the switches to use on the sourceforge page for LAME:
ID3 tagging:

--tt <title> audio/song title (max 30 chars for version 1 tag)
--ta <artist> audio/song artist (max 30 chars for version 1 tag)
--tl <album> audio/song album (max 30 chars for version 1 tag)

I'll start a post under feature requests too and consider this one kaput.

[Palmski]

I have the same problem but max bitrate is set to "No Limit".

I also have "Player has dynamic IP" and "Control player automatically" set for what it's worth.

Anyone know what the problem might be?

[aplus01]

@Palmski - Yeah, the issue is with the LAME encoder. Subsonic isn't requesting the LAME encoder to provide the Title & Artist info.

Sounds like you aren't downsampling but maybe converting from one format to another which would use the LAME encoder.

I opened a feature request for it since its nice to know what you're listening to. Sindre indicated it was in the long list-o-things he was working on it.

Here's the feature request if you're interested

[Palmski]

Ah thanks, that's likely it - I do have quite a few m4a files thanks to iTunes. Should have remembered the transcoding....

At least it's good to know what the problem is so I don't spend hours trying to figure out a way of fixing it.