Update KB968816 breaks WMP10/MCE2005's ability to play some MP3s

Hi all,

I've encountered a problem with MCE / Windows Media Player 10, after
installation of update KB968816 (Security Update for Windows Media Format
Runtime).

After this update, MCE and WMP refuse to play any MP3s containing a TLEN
(Total Length) field in the ID3 tags (which were previously playable), giving
the message:

"The file you tried to play <filename> is either missing, corrupt or in
a location that is not currently available." (MCE2005)
or
"Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support
the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the
file." (WMP10)

TLEN is a commonly-used field present in a large number of commercially
available MP3s and is also inserted by several MP3 creation programs.
Manually removing the TLEN field from the MP3 file results in the file
becoming playable; re-creating the tag results in the error message
re-occuring.

This problem has occurred on 3 separate XP systems (2 with MCE2005/SP2+WMP10
and one with just XP/SP2+WMP10). I've also tested this out on a clean
install of XP+WMP10+SP3. Manually applying KB968816 causes the error;
uninstalling it allows the files to play.

This seems to be a bug in update KB968816 (if this field can't be supported
for some reason, the value should be ignored; the file should still play).

Obvious courses of action are to:
* remove KB968816 - since this is a "critical security update", I'm not
comforable with that; or
* remove TLEN from every MP3 in my collection - which I'm also not happy
with, since that's a "moderate" amount of effort, and a loss of data, just to
work around a bug.

I'd welcome any other suggestions or comments.

Regards,

gvm

Thanks for your post.. I had no idea why my MP3's stopped playing in Media
Player but they would play in Winamp. After hours of troubleshooting I found
it was this patch. Remove it and everything is back to normal. I found in
my troubleshooting tha removing the id3v2 tags (but leaving id3v1) fixed it
but I have too many mp3's in my collection to do this. Also thought it was
strange in Windows explorer that the length of the song wasn't displaying
until I removed the id3 tag.

"SandyW" wrote:

> Thanks for your post.. I had no idea why my MP3's stopped playing in Media
> Player but they would play in Winamp. After hours of troubleshooting I found
> it was this patch. Remove it and everything is back to normal. I found in
> my troubleshooting tha removing the id3v2 tags (but leaving id3v1) fixed it
> but I have too many mp3's in my collection to do this. Also thought it was
> strange in Windows explorer that the length of the song wasn't displaying
> until I removed the id3 tag.

Further details in this thread:
http://www.microsoft.com/communities...=en-us&m=1&p=1

gvm

"SandyW" wrote:

> Thanks for your post.. I had no idea why my MP3's stopped playing in Media
> Player but they would play in Winamp. After hours of troubleshooting I found
> it was this patch. Remove it and everything is back to normal. I found in
> my troubleshooting tha removing the id3v2 tags (but leaving id3v1) fixed it
> but I have too many mp3's in my collection to do this. Also thought it was
> strange in Windows explorer that the length of the song wasn't displaying
> until I removed the id3 tag.

Are you using MP3Tag, or a similar tag editor?

If so, you might want to check out the (hopefully final) resolution to this
in my post today, here:
http://www.microsoft.com/communities...=en-us&m=1&p=1

Regards,

gvm