Windows Media Player - Flashing text was great, back in 1980

Hardware and technical stuff
1

OK, I’m way way way behind the times vis-a-vis playing back CDs in my system. Anyways, today I dropped a music CD in and let Windows Media Player version 11 play it back. I figured out how to make it go out to the internet to retrieve album information.

But when it plays back at either regular size or in the compact mode, it flashes all kinds of useless text in sequence, with about 1 text change per second (album name, artist, composer (yeah, I need to see THAT cycling), song name).

Flashing text was one of the coolest graphical effects I’d seen, WHEN I SAW IT ON AN APPLE II CIRCA 1980. It’s a bit passe nowadays though, and very distracting. (OK, technically Apple II’s Flash command is not what we’re talking about - WMP is actually doing cycling text, but it’s roughly as annoying.) Is Microsoft still so dense that there is no readily findable option to disable this on the 11th version of their media player? I though Microsoft was at least making an attempt to embrace good interface design 5 or so years ago,

2

Is it an old CD+G?

3

It was an old 80s CD (standard, AFAIK), 38 Special Flashback.

Yeah, I know my cred around here just dropped 20 points by naming that CD…

4

Some older CDs have graphics in them that do what you describe. They play just like a regular CD but they have markings on them that say they are a CD+G. (CD + Graphics)

Media Player itself doesn’t throw blinking words on the screen or anything like that unless you have a strange visualizer running which you can right click the screen and change. Usually it’s some kaleidescope type light-show that you can also switch off and having nothing but music or a track list.

So it sounds like a CD+G. Try a different CD and see what it does. If it’s the same thing, try switching the visual mode to a different display, or just switch it off.

5

Hmm, I just tried The Beatles’ Let It Be and James Taylor’s Greatest Hits. It doesn’t want to automatically download info on these and I can’t remember how to repeat what I did yesterday to download that info. Shouldn’t there be a way to have it automatically go get that info?