I’m working on a little sample application for music management in Silverlight using WCF RIA Services and some other new Silverlight 4 features.  One thing that I wanted to add to the application was the ability to drag an audio file and either lookup the data and/or add a new album/artist/song to the library automatically. Audio formats have a ‘tag’ format known as ID3.  It’s a format used for audio file metadata that is used in Windows Media Player, iTunes, and various hardware devices as well.  Over the years there has been an evolution of this format, with the...

You may be reading the title and wondering what is MediaStreamSource?  MediaStreamSource is a piece of the Silverlight runtime that removes a the influence of a media file's container, giving developers direct access to APIs for manipulating encoded elementary audio and video streams. Huh? Basically it can enable you as the developer to implement file parsers/etc. in managed code instead of Silverlight, enabling support beyond the native built-in formats for media.  There hasn’t been much information about these types of topics, and I’d agree that for the mainstream, they may be a bit more advanced media scenarios for when...

while preparing for the code trip, we have several 'on-board' needs.  one of which is a quick method to get our content encoded for consumption by devices and frameworks (i.e., silverlight).  we want a smooth method so that we aren't boggled down with multiple tools opening and changing settings, cutting and pasting, etc. so, inspired by my colleagues post about using workflow to automate, i set about the task.  we're going to be making several assumptions along our production, one of which is we know we'll have multiple video/audio sources and that there *will* be some post-edit being done.  but once...

i'm writing this on the plane but i've just returned from 10 days in italy.  we visited venice, florence and rome.  i'm exhausted.  my feet are cursing me beyond belief and i felt like i walked 800 miles even though it was probably about 60.  i won't bore you with my slideshow, but share my thoughts on traveling abroad as an american used to certain technical amenities. i will caveat with: first trip to europe at all (fiji was my only other out of country experience) ...

well, even though i haven't seen them, i'm impressed with the announcement.  maybe i switched too soon, but i still stand by my decision based on my personal needs (car aftermarket oem integration).  regardless, here's what the new zunes will bring... 80GB and 4/8GB flash versions new Zunes will have new UI and features..."old" Zune users will get those features as well! native codecs for h.264 and MPEG-4 -- no need for only...

hey all, quick update here.  i've been starting to record some media (audio/video interviews) and have set up some feeds for your podcasting delight.  next week especially i'll be uploading a few from MIX07 with some great updates that microsoft will be announcing. so, here's an explanation of them (they are on the left and as well as alternate links in the site meta data): All *casts: this is all WMV and MP3 files so you'll get video and audio MP3 Casts: um yeah, mp3 files only WMV Casts: um yeah, wmv files only right now...