Windows CD Player

~ the obituary ~

A compact disc in a computer's drive was an anonymous object. The machine could count the tracks and measure how long each one ran, and that was the entire contents of its knowledge. The disc carried audio and a table of contents and nothing else, no title, no artist, not one byte of text anywhere on it, because when the format was specified in 1980 there was no reason to imagine a listener who could read a screen.

CD Player was Microsoft's answer to that gap, and the answer was to hand the problem to you. Its first release is dated 13 August 1993. It shipped with Windows 95 and Windows 98, went out on the NT line from 3.1 onward, and was still sitting under Accessories in Windows 2000. Transport controls, a track list, a time readout that switched between the track and the whole disc, random and continuous play. Nothing in it was ambitious.

The interesting part was the naming. You could type in the artist, the album title and every track name yourself, and CD Player would write them into cdplayer.ini keyed against that disc's table of contents. Put the same record in again a month later and it recognized the pattern of track lengths and gave you back your own typing. It was a private database of the music in your own house, built one album at a time, by you, in a text file with a 64 kilobyte limit.

By 2002 the question had stopped mattering to me and to most people, because the music had moved into a folder of mp3s where the names traveled inside the files. That is the real shift buried under this applet. Metadata stopped being something you attached to an object you owned and became something that shipped with the copy. A compilation you burned yourself matched no table of contents anywhere and never would, which was fine, because by then nobody was burning them to play in a computer.

~ the case file ~

~ the deluxe version ~

There was a fancier one. Deluxe CD Player came in Microsoft Plus! for Windows 98 and then in Windows 2000, and it also turned up in a Windows Me beta and a Windows XP beta without surviving to either final build. It kept its data in an Access database file called DeluxeCD.mdb instead of an ini, which lifted the size ceiling, and it could go out over the network and fetch album information rather than waiting for you to type it.

The services it asked were Tunes.com and Music Boulevard. Both of those are dead, and one of them has a grave here. So the first time Windows tried to look a record up over the internet, the places it asked were record shops, which tells you exactly what everyone assumed the answer to this problem would be: the people selling you the disc obviously know what is on it.

~ what replaced it ~

Windows Me went on sale on 14 September 2000 without CD Player in it. Media Player absorbed CD playback and pulled track listings from a network database, and by Windows XP there was no cdplayer.ini on the system at all. People who upgraded found that the album names they had typed by hand over five years did not come with them, because there was no longer a file for them to live in. The naming problem got solved by moving it onto a server, which is how nearly every personal-data problem got solved that decade.

The volunteer answer went the same way and faster. CDDB started as a community effort to identify discs by their table of contents and turned into Gracenote, a licensing business that charged for the lookup. freedb forked off to keep it free and eventually shut down too. Between 1998 and 2001 the question of what record this is went from something you answered yourself, to something a group of strangers answered for free, to something a company sold.

~ what got buried with it ~

Nothing important, on the face of it. An applet with four buttons that a better applet replaced. But the thing it assumed is now genuinely strange: that your machine's knowledge of your own possessions was local, hand-made and yours, kept in a file you could open in Notepad and edit. There was no account, no sync, no canonical version somewhere else that would overwrite you if you disagreed with it. If you wanted to file an album under a name only you used, it stayed that way forever.

The drive it needed is gone from laptops as well, so the whole apparatus has to be described rather than demonstrated. Somewhere on old hard disks there are cdplayer.ini files holding a few hundred hand-typed track names, mostly spelled wrong, keyed to discs that are in a box in somebody's parents' house. That is the last copy of that data. Nobody backed it up because nobody thought of it as data.

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