Preparing for Windows 9

[GhostRider 46]

Hi,

 

With rumours that pre-release Windows 9 will be released to developers soon and a public release vaguely hinted at for April 2015 I am starting to think about what I need to do to prepare for Windows 9. I currently use Windows Media Center on Windows 7 for my music and MBC for my movies, a combination that works really well.

 

As Windows Media Center is on life support from Microsoft in Windows 8 I fear it may disappear in Windows 9. The main migration issue I have is that my music collection is in WMA lossless format. All the music tag info is kept in the file including the star rating. The star rating, release year and genera tags are very important to me. I have approx. 80 dynamic play lists e.g. “favourite jazz not heard recently”.

 

I was wondering if anybody has advice on how to move my my music collection way from Microsoft’s lossless WMA format.

 

1) What alternative lossless file format should I convert my WMA collection to?

 

2) Is there a way to migrate the music track metadata tags across to the new file format?

 

3) What other media centre programs support dynamic playlists? E.g. does XBMC support this?

 

Are there are other issues I need to think about if I move away from Windows Media Center?

 

 

 

[porkbone 38]

dbpoweramp is a great program for converting music files, but I don't have a lot of experience with wma lossless so I'm not sure on the tagging transfer or dynamic playlists. I am now using flac files for audio which I also tag with mp3tag - a great tagging program.

 

If you do go with dbpoweramp, get the reference version - it comes with a batch convert option and a great ripper/tagger.

[Mibok 118]

 I have used dbpoweramp before to migrate my WMAlossless to flac without any problem, most of the metadata is retained when converting so give it a try.