Where can I find a good manual on "mciSendStringA" (from WINMM.LIB)?

[akalenuk]

I've been on MSDN and found their pages mostly unusable. Not much examples, poor explainations of how it works. Well, I can research most of the issues myselfs, but maybe someone allready has a perfect manual on this topic?

[PBrennick]

Ron Thomas has this to say:

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TestMCI
-------

A test program which issues MCI commands to a CD ROM drive. Then if a suitable audio
CD is in place it can be opened and played using the appropriate MCI commands.

When started the program presents a dialog, which has a window where these commands
can be entered, an error window where an appropriate message is presented, if for
example the wrong type of CD is used, etc.

MCI commands
============

open   cdaudio This prepares the CD drive for use
(Make sure you have an audio CD in it
play   cdaudio Plays from the start
pause  cdaudio

STATUS
------
status cdaudio position Will display the current playing position, e.g 02:30:20
status cdaudio mode Returns "stopped" or "playing"
status cdaudio time format Show the time format as msf, or minutes,seconds,frames
status cdaudio length Returns the length in msf format
status cdaudio number of tracks Shows number of available tracks
status cdaudio length track n Gives the length of track n
status cdaudio position track n Gives the position of start of track n

With such position information you can play one piece of music and stop e.g
play   cdaudio from 10:20:30 to 15:20:25

You can also reset the time format to tracks-minutes-seconds-frames

set cdaudio time format tmsf

Then you can issue a command to play a selected track e.g

play cdaudio from 3:0:0:0 to 4:0:0:0   or  more simply play cdaudio from 3 to 4
 
The play command can also have a wait option, when the CD will play to the end
and cannot be stopped. This is somewhat inconvienient and if you do want to stop
you can set an escape key, e.g

Set cdaudio on 27 Here we set the Esc key first and then start play
play cdaudio wait         Then hitting the Esc key stops the music.
                                (*** But this refuses to work on my PC ***)

A useful alternative is to use the notify option which raise a MM_MCINOTIFY message
when the requested piece of music has finished e.g

play cdaudio from 4:0:0 to 5:0:0 notify
     
In this instance when the music ends the MM_MCINOTIFY message is processed and
is shown in the Group box of the dialog. This message disappears after 5 seconds

stop cdaudio stops the CD

close cdaudio finishes with the CD

There is a possible eject command which ejects the CD from the drive, but it does not work
on all drives, mine include.

*** For more information on MCI command usage refer to the Microsoft /Platform SDK/Graphics
and Multimedia Services/Multimedia Reference/Multimedia Commmand Strings ***


Attached is his example.
Paul


[attachment deleted by admin]

[P1]

mmedia.hlp was a part of the 9X SDK, which was available until M$ stopped support for W9X, for download.

Technically speaking, There is not a EULA to cover it being redistributed here.

Attachment Deleted.

Regards,  P1  :8)

[akalenuk]

Attached is his example.

Thanks. I've allready done that. I even use my own homebrew mediaplayer for plaing audio files. But all i need is a nice big manual to help me with that issues i can't dig by myself.

[akalenuk]

mmedia.hlp was a part of the 9X SDK, which was available until M$ stopped support for W9X, for download.

Technically speaking, There is not a EULA to cover it being redistributed here.

Thanks. No need to. I've allready downloaded it. By the way, what is that EULA?

[P1]

... By the way, what is that EULA?

See Here:
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/EULA.html

Regards,  P1  :8)

[akalenuk]

See Here:
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/EULA.html

Ah, "End-User"!  Thanks  :bg