4

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.

mroach
  • 2,403
  • 1
  • 22
  • 29
  • Are you running off Windows 2000? Otherwise have you tried to run cdplayer.exe as administrator? – Simon Mourier Aug 11 '20 at 06:58
  • @SimonMourier how running as administrator could make a difference and affect it? It can't get to access the network/internet? I am pretty curious and I would like to reverse engineer it and see how it behaves but I don't have time unfortunately. – Christos Lytras Aug 11 '20 at 07:58
  • Yes I'm running this on Windows 2000 directly and logged-in as Administrator. The "Run as Administrator" concept wasn't part of Windows 2000 anyway. Applications ran as the current users (unless they were a service). And yes it has access to the network and the server. I inspect the requests and responses with Wireshark and they all look good to me, but clearly something is missing. – mroach Aug 28 '20 at 14:46

0 Answers0