Windows Media Player

Let me first start off by saying, I am no computer fool. I built my own machine, and know the ins and outs of it very well. I am simply stuck with a stupid software problem, and I am not sure if it is a virus, spyware or just Windows media player being stupid from an installed program.


The basic problem is... I downloaded a file that had the extention FLAC which is a sound file encoded with a lossless audio codec. I was unable to play it, so I tried to download a patch so that I could both play it with nero showtime, and burn it with nero. The site escapes me, but I've downloaded patches for nero from that site before without problem. NOW here's the problem. Anytime I play an audio file, it either stops playing within 4 seconds. OR plays perfectly normal. HOWEVER upon closing windows media player I ALWAYS get a popup window that says "Cancelling inspection of files on device..."

It is at this point that my computer becomes completely useless for about a min or two because the window won't close, and nothing I click on opens or anything. Please for the love of God help me.

 

Update

I don't even have to play anything. I still get the message. In this message I have no option to cancel, and a green progress bar goes across the window and closes. It happens every single time. I've seen posts on the internet that shows this happening with the zune. I do not have a zune, nor any other mp3 player.

 

Hi,

I have had the same problem (at least I think it is very similar). My problem is that I started using my Nokia N93 with Bluetooth always on, and allowed automatic connections to the PC. This means that the phone and the PC will always connect to each other everytime they are near one another.

I then noticed that Windows Media Player would open those stupid boxes with the "cancelling inspection of files on device" message. This would not happen everytime, but often enough for me to start to get really anoyed. And I couldn't simply ignore it since any media file you try to open has no effect until the stupid inspection has finished. I could kill Windows Media Player and related processes and it would solve the problem, but only temporarily until I opened some other media file.

I started to get suspicious of the mobile-PC connection. As I started using my Nokia 6630 the same way as my N93 then the box would appear much more often. In fact, if I turn the phones off, then the stupid box never shows. I investigated the Windows Media Player settings and found a "Devices" section that lists all devices. That includes CD's, Pen Drives, and, of course, my mobile phones.

I tried disabling the device search. Microsoft has made an extremely stupid mistake and I cannot disable the search. I cannot stress this enough: it was a really stupid stupid stupid mistake to make. Why not give me an option to disable it? What genious decided this?? If anyone from Microsoft is reading this then please memorize: that was a very stupid design error, please correct it ASAP!

Anyway, although I was unable to disable the device inspection, I noticed that the problem would go away if I renamed the phone device (within the Windows Media Player "Devices" section) to some nonsense (like "a" or "dummy") by opening the properties and changing the name. Then the stupid box would no longer appear. And the renaming does not get applied to the phone, just locally in Windows Media Player, and so the inspections ended. Well, don't ask me how it works, but it worked for me. My theory is that if these devices (phones) are connected to the PC then Windows Media Player will try to look inside my 1GB memory cards over the bluetooth connection (or something like that) which will tend to be slow and unresponsive at times.

I restarted the computer (to see if the solution survived) and noticed that Windows Media Player then forgets the renaming I did. But if I do it again then it seems to remember it until the next restart. This is not a big problem for me since I always hibernate. If I go to the "Devices" again it refreshes the list and finds the phone again (and corrects the name). If you ask me, I think the renaming I do gets ignored pretty quick, but the stupid box does not show.

I hope this helps! I registered on this forum just to give you this piece of information, since I searched for help and it seems very few people are commenting on the problem.

Rilhas

 

that is absolutely true gentlemen. I have solved my problem. I noticed that if my flash drive was not plugged in, then the box would not appear. Much like when you rename your device, windows can not find it. There must be some sort of crap that is making windows put that box up. I think it may be because I switch between Mac, and PC bringing AIFF files back home to work with. (I make commercials in ProTools) Since the files are AIFF I play them in quicktime, rather than WMP, but still I think this may have been the problem somehow, the switch btwn Mac and PC I mean, not the files. So I copied all the files on my flash drive, to my desktop, formatted the drive, and replaced all the files on my flash drive. I lost no data whatsoever, and now my problem seems solved. Yes, it was a bit of a pain in the butt, however I found people with the ZUNE having the same problem, and their solution was to format. I gave it a try, and it works. Perhaps you can do the same with your phone somehow. Let us know if it works ok?
Thedagem

 

Hi all,

I checked my sharing and it is disabled (it has always been). Nevertheless, WMP still tries to refresh the devices list, and when it finds them it will still try to look inside them. So I still don't know how to disable device scanning in WMP (my version is 11.0).

It is true that formatting the card helps a little, since the stupid inspection box becomes a little faster to complete. In fact, anything that reduces the amount of information exchanged between the PC and the phone helps. This includes all solutions from turning off bluetooth, removing the phone's memory card, etc.

I have noticed over time that the 1GB memory card becomes slower and slower as I fill it up. If I format it and leave it empty then it becomes faster again. If I format it and put the data back all at once then the speed will endup being somewhere in between, but still too slow for WMP to check everytime I stop playing a media file (since I have more than 1000 files on the card) and so the box will still show up. I have 3 cards from diferent manufacturers and they all show the same behaviour (maybe the phone implementation is causing the increased delay with increasing filled space, I don't know).

I may be experiencing a problem slightly diferent from yours in the sense that I'm using a bluetooth connection. These connections will suffer heavily as the distance from the phone to the PC increases, and as other users (neigbors for example) use bluetooth as well. Also, Wi-Fi will sometimes interferes with bluetooth. All these factors acumulate to disturb the phone-PC connection in such a random way that sometimes there is no problem, and at other times there is nothing but problems.

So, the only solutions that work for me are: turning off the phone, turning off bluetooth, taking out the card, or (my favorite) renaming the phone device in WMP to some nonsense. Since I hybernate the PC I have now gone 2 whole days whithout seeing the stupid (oh so stupid) inspection box again, and that makes me very happy!