The CD Player in Windows 2000 supports fetching track metadata from one of two remote services: Tunes.com or MusicBoulevard.com. Both APIs are gone so the CD Player can no longer fetch track metadata.
I used Wireshark to see the request format which is straight-forward.
www.tunes.com
GET /tunes-cgi2/tunes/disc_info/203/cd=D+96+3B87+73B9+B2C3+EFEC+12856+165FA+1A976+1E332+22277+257F5+29517+2E04F+32110 HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)
Host: www.tunes.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
The query is identical for both providers
mscd.musicboulevard.com
GET /cgi-bin/twcd/0_1100_cd=D+96+3B87+73B9+B2C3+EFEC+12856+165FA+1A976+1E332+22277+257F5+29517+2E04F+32110 HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)
Host: mscd.musicblvd.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
cd
parameter
The cd
parameter is a list with: number of tracks, followed by the sector offset of each track and the lead-out, all hex encoded. So these queries are for a cd with 13 tracks and sector offsets at:
150, 15239, 29625, 45763, 61420, 75862, 91642, 108918, 123698, 139895, 153589, 169239, 188495
and a lead-out at 205072
This leads me to believe that it expects the same response format from both providers. The question is: what does it expect for a response format? If I knew that, I could create a gateway that looks-up the discs on MusicBrainz and returns a usable response.
It's easy to add a new provider via the registry at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\DeluxeCD
I've scoured the internet, usenet, and anywhere else I can think of without any luck so far.
Edit: Found some information, still no joy
Thanks to archive.org I was able to find a handful of crawled responses to tunes.com queries.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.tunes.com/tunes-cgi2/tunes/disc_info/*
For example:
[CD]
CERTIFICATE=41d602112509916cb8f45f81164805e29bfef1946c88dc57
Mode=0
Title=SUMMER GIRLS
Artist=LFO
Track1=Summer Girls
Track2=Girl on TV
Track3=Cross My heart
Track4=Cant have you
Track5=I dont wanna Kiss you goodnight
Track6=West Side Story
Track7=Thinking about you
Track8=I will show you mine
Track9=All I need to know
Track10=Baby Be mine
Track11=Your heart is safe with me
Track12=My block
Track13=Forever
Menu1=RollingStone Biography::http://www.tunes.com/mscd.asp?t=b&id=6958
Menu2=RS Photos::http://www.tunes.com/mscd.asp?t=p&id=6958
Menu3=RS Triva::http://www.tunes.com/mscd.asp?t=t&id=6958
Menu4=RS Videos::http://www.tunes.com/mscd.asp?t=v&id=6958
Menu5=RS Discussions::http://www.tunes.com/mscd.asp?t=d&id=6958
Menu6=RS Discography::http://www.tunes.com/mscd.asp?t=disc&id=6958
Menu7=RS Links::http://www.tunes.com/mscd.asp?t=l&id=6958
Menu8=Get Related MP3s::http://www.tunes.com/mscd.asp?t=mp3&id=6958
The problem is, if I serve this answer to the CD Player, I still get This album was not found on the Internet.
I had a concern about the CERTIFICATE
value, but it's the same across every response I found on the internet archive. So I'm not sure what that's meant to be doing.
I tried using \n
and \r\n
line endings and content-type
response headers of text/html
and text/plain
. My guess now is I'm missing a response header.