2008-10-22

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:

Explorer advanced search results for Cascada with TLPH installed

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:

  1. Explorer accepting VT_BSTR and Windows Search not; solved by switching to InitPropVariantFromString.
  2. Stupid mistakes with pointers. Oh, how I hate you.


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