Windows 11: MP3 preview WMP or XYplorer

[rhmelis]

Hello fellow enthusiasts,

I've searched the forum and have come across related subjects but i cannot for the life of me explain why two, seemingly similar, mp3's should have different preview behavior in XYPlorer.

- Some mp3's use the XYPlorer preview with all the details and the mini player. (1.jpg)

- Some mp3's use an embedded Windows Media Player (Legacy) in XYPlorer as a preview. (2.jpg)

My default mp3 player is set to Winamp and above behavior does not affect normal playback. It's purely the preview...
They also both play fine in their own preview.
Windows 11 24H2 by the way.

I have use MediaTool to compare the files and there are slight variations between these two example files. But it also happens with many other mp3 files which are all different.

Anyway, I'm stumped. Am I overlooking something obvious?

Thank you for reading this and I'm curious if anyone has an idea.

Cheers,
Remco

[admin]

Well, I wish I knew Most mp3s can be digested by Quartz (aka DirectShow), but some just won't work here. Falling back to WMP usually works for them.

[rhmelis]

Thanks for the reply!

I'm now positive that it's linked to the mp3 tags. When i strip an mp3 (which previously fell back tot WMP) of its tags, it is then previewed normally in XYplorer.
I cannot, however, reverse this process. No matter what I put in the tag, the mp3 is previewed in the "normal" way.

No biggie, just interesting and perplexing

[admin]

Looks like WMP is more tolerant of quirky tagging than DirectShow.

[rhmelis]

Follow up: I found out the reason why this behavior occurs and it's easy to verify.

It is directly linked to the filesize of the embedded cover in the mp3 tag!

The cut-off seems to be 120kb. If the embedded cover is larger than this, XYplorer no longer uses the regular preview but falls back to WMP.

For my test I also uninstalled WMP (thinking it might be related to this) and the affected mp3 files are now "previewed as thumbnails".
(And no, mp3 is not listed under Previewed Formats > Preview as Thumbnail)

Is this a DirectShow thing or a XYplorer thing?

[admin]

Interesting! But unfortunately useless because it's a DirectShow thing.