Brian's Brain

I previously related my difficulties in getting Yahoo Music Unlimited to work with my beloved 5GB iRiver H10 portable music player. I've long suspected that the issue centered on DRM; somehow the connection was getting garbled between Microsoft's Windows Media DRM scheme, Yahoo's implementation of it and the license file scheme that the H10 was expecting.

Looks like I was right. About a month ago, a somewhat cryptic DRM-related hotfix appeared on Microsoft's Windows Update service (here's the corresponding documentation from Microsoft that clarifies matters). Since testing the fix would require reformatting and re-downloading 5 GBytes' worth of tunes to the H10, I dragged my feet. However, an email from reader David Barton, who'd seen my earlier dialogue of a partial fix for the delay on Brian's Brian and the MisticRiver forum, happily reported that the fix worked as advertised.

And now I can confirm David's conclusions. iRiver just released a firmware uprev that enables DRM'd content on the H10 to be recognized by the Xbox 360, and I've got an Xbox 360, so since firmware uprevs also require drive reformats....I got off my rump and took the plunge. The latest version of Yahoo Music Engine has a slick feature, which I also employed (to reset the number-of-associated-portable-player count), whereby you can do a single-click relicense of one or multiple tracks. Now the track-to-track latency is less than a second; not instantaneous, mind you, but far less annoying than before, and comparable to what my wife experiences on her Creative Labs Zen Micro.

However, I still can't use Yahoo Music Engine as my H10's media manager, because Yahoo continues using its bizarre tagging scheme for multi-disc album sets. Take, for example, Keller Williams' Stage, which I'm listening to now (yes, I'm on Amtrak again, headed to Silicon Valley for a day's worth of meetings). Yahoo gives the first tracks of disc 1 (Tubeular) and disc 2 (Shapes of M&Ms) the same track tag: '1'. It differentiates between them using a disc 1 vs 2 tag; a tag that neither Windows Media Player 10 nor the iRiver H10 appears to comprehend. I can correctly order the tracks in YME by means of a playlist (another gripe; the playlists are of late coming down from Yahoo's servers in garbled order, so I need to drag-and-drop the tracks to fix the sequence), but I can't transfer that playlist file to the H10.

If I transfer the tracks by selecting the album, they get ordered with all the track 1s first, then track 2s....and with the same-numbered tracks alphabetically ordered (i.e. Shapes of M&Ms before Tubeular). If I transfer the tracks by selecting the playlist, they again get ordered with all of the track 1s first...but this time the same numbered-tracks are disc-by-disc ordered (i.e. Tubeular before Shapes of M&Ms). Neither scheme represents the artist's originally envisioned sequence, of course. So instead, I need to continue importing the tracks into Windows Media Player and overriding the numerical data for disc 2 and subsequent disc tracks's tags. Pragmatically, I'd need to continue doing the WMP import anyway, since Windows Media Connect (which my Xbox 360 employs to access media files stored on Windows XP-powered LAN clients) works through WMP. But if Yahoo would fix its track numbering scheme, or alternatively differentiate between the multiple discs of an album set via unique 'album' name tags, I wouldn't need to do the two-step every time I want to feed my H10 some new tunes.