AV Mix Master – Release Notes
Version 4.2
Released February 19th 2012
- Added support for downloading YouTube videos as MP4s
- Autodownload of YouTube videos
- Video support and streaming support for videos
- Minor Bug fixes
How to rebuild your Windows Media Player Library?
Step 1: Stop Windows Media Player and its services
- Click the start menu and type “services.msc” in the textbox. A program called services.msc will show, which you will need to click
- In the services management console find the service “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service” and select it.
- At the left part of the screen, you can click “Stop” to stop the service (alternatively you can right-click the service and choose “Stop” from the services’ context menu
- Now open up the task manager clicking the Start button again and now you need to type “taskmgr.exe” and select it from the list. Alternatively you can right-click on any empty part of the taskbar and choose “Start Task Manager” from the taskbar’s context menu.
- The task manager shows and you will need to find any reference to Windows Media Player. In this case click the “Processes” tab and scroll down to find any item named “wmplayer.exe” (with or without “*32” behind its name). Select that item and click “End Process” and wait until the process has ended. You can now close the task manager.
- You have now successfully stopped all Windows Media Player related processes. Time to proceed.
Step 2: Deleting the library
- Click Start again and now type (or copy and paste) this folder name:
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player
You should see the term “Media Player” in the start menu like below and you need to click it.
- The Windows Explorer window will show something like this:
- Delete the file “CurrentDatabase_372.wmdb”. NOTE: the number 372 may be different on your system; delete any file starting with “CurrentDatabase” and ending with “.wmdb”
- Delete all files that start with “LocalMLS_” and end with “.wmdb”
- Close the Windows Explorer window
Step 3: re-enable the Windows Media Player network service
Step 4: Let Windows Media Player rebuild the database
Step 5: Reboot your machine (optional)
Finished
AV Mix Master 4.1 New Kiosk Mode
The latest version of AV Mix Master (introduced in version 4.1) now has a complete kiosk overhaul. See the screenshot below. It not only looks brand new, but it has some great new features as well. Best feature must be the dual YouTube video rendering. Which means you can play YouTube videos just as you would play normal music files. The YouTube videos will mix and fade-out like normal files. AV Mix Master will even preload YouTube content in the inactive player, so it will play without any buffering problems. Read on after the image.
The Looks
As you can see the kiosk uses album covers as your background. AV Mix Master will first search your music library for “folder.jpg” files, which usually are used for album covers. The album covers are translated to black & white and will be stored in the folder “C:\ProgramData\AV Soft\BackgroundCache” for future retrieval and caching (which means that the kiosk will have greater startup speed). On top of that an overlay with a slight transparency. This overlay will change colors around every 60 seconds.
The interface is quite clean and only contains these features:
- Now Playing (in this case “Nelson – She’s Gone”)
- Coming Up / Just Played (in this case Madonna with Justify My Love)
- YouTube video (if any is played), in this case the YouTube video of Nelson with She’s Gone.
- Control buttons (only after mouse move or after clicking the touch circle)
During play, some elements will animate so that screen burn is prevented.
How does it work?
Show
To start the kiosk, simply click the “Kiosk” button at the top of the main screen in AV Mix Master. Now the kiosk will build. Note that this might take some time the first time it is started.
Hide
To hide the kiosk, simply click anywhere except on a control button, now playing album cover or YouTube video.
Controls
The following controls are available in kiosk mode:
- Skip Track: the circle button with two arrows is used for skipping to the next track
- Play/Pause: the circle button with either two vertical stripes or a right-pointing arrow can be used to either start or stop the player
- Eject upcoming track: on top of the “coming up” album cover is an eject symbol. Click it to eject the next track in case you don’t like what’s coming up
- Touch button: the button with the finger symbol can be used on touch screens to bring up the other controls. If you hover the mouse, all control buttons will be visible. The control buttons will automatically hide after a user is inactive for about 3 seconds.
- YouTube buttons: below the YouTube video a button row is found with these buttons: Reload, Close and Full Screen. Reload will simply reload the player with the current track (to be used if you want to rewind the video or if the player did not get loaded in the first place"). The Close button will make the YouTube video invisible whilst still playing the sound of that video. The full screen button will simply make the YouTube video full screen. In that case a full screen close button will show at the top right corner so you can return to normal video mode
Album Images
The new kiosk will automatically retrieve album images from internet if the album image is not embedded in the music file that is playing. These album images will be used in the background and will be cached for future kiosk starts.
Other features
Many other small features are in the new kiosk, but they are all quite subtle so no need to explain them here. If you have performance problems on your PC (the new kiosk is a bit more memory and CPU intensive than the other one), you can still use the old kiosk mode. To do so, you need to click the settings button and go to the settings form. Click Kiosk and then deselect “Enable animated kiosk (requires restart)”. As mentioned in the checkbox, you need to restart AV Mix Master to have the old kiosk in effect.
AV Mix Master–Kiosk
This is how it looks
This is the typical screen you see when the kiosk is shown:
Kiosk – functionality
The Kiosk can be used to show YouTube videos, song lyrics, album art or visualizations. You can select which one you want to see by clicking the corresponding icons to the left of the screen.
- The CD icon will show you the album art if any. If no album art is found, a more generic album art is generated containing the album artist and title
- The Microphone icon will show you the lyrics of the song (if any; if no lyrics are found, the Microphone symbol will be invisible).
The lyrics will scroll downwards automatically. - YouTube icon will show you the YouTube video that AV Mix Master has found for the currently playing song or simply the video for the Youtube item you are currently playing
- The wave icon will show you visualizations. AV Mix Master’s visualizations are compatible with Windows Media Player’s visualizations so you can use any ones of those
In the upper right you will see the countdown of the currently playing track together with information on how may items are still in your playlist or, if AutoFill is enabled, the genre that is currently used.
The left bottom corner shows the time (this can be turned off and size can be set as well in the options for kiosk)
The right bottom corner shows what will be played next (can also be disabled in the options for kiosk)
Next to the image (or video, lyrics, visualizations) are buttons to change the video, lyrics or visualizations. The X button will remove the video; the next button will show the next YouTube match if any; the speaker icon will mute the sound of AV Mix Master and will unmute the YouTube sound and vice versa. The full screen icon will make the current video, lyrics or visualization full screen.
Show or Hide the kiosk
In the right top corner of AV Mix Master you can click the “Kiosk Mode” button (if it is orange a YouTube video is playing). Clicking it again, will hide the kiosk (this is of course only possible if the kiosk is shown on a secondary screen). Clicking anywhere on the kiosk screen itself except for the icon buttons or the video itself, will also hide the kiosk.
Furthermore, the kiosk will show automatically if a user is idle (i.e. not using the keyboard or mouse for about 180 seconds). This option can be set in the kiosk settings, together with the interval time.
Kiosk Settings
- Enable Kiosk Mode
If checked, the kiosk mode will automatically kick-in after the specified time - Automatically Show Kiosk in Seconds
Specifies how many seconds a user must be idle before the kiosk shows. Set to 0 to start immediately when AV Mix Master starts - Transparency level
Sets the transparency of the kiosk; move the slider to the left to make the kiosk more transparent (allowing you to see through it) or to the right to make it less transparent - Show Time in Kiosk Mode
If checked shows the time in the left bottom corner of the kiosk; select either large or small font for the time - Show Popup window when new song is playing
This is not strictly kiosk related, but will indicate if a small information box is shown whenever a new song is being started. The popup will only show if AV Mix Master is not the active program. - Show YouTube video in kiosk if found
Automatically searches for YouTube videos that match the currently playing song. It will only show the video, the sound comes from your local file. Disable this if you don’t want to show the videos automatically - Show Kiosk on Secondary Monitor
If you have a second monitor, you can select this to show the kiosk on that monitor. This is ideal for showing your guests what is playing, while you keep AV Mix Master’s interface out of sight - Show Video On Secondary Monitor
Normally videos will play on the primary monitor; if you select this, a second video window will be created on the secondary monitor, allowing both screens to show the same video
You can also change the colors of the kiosk in the Colors & Layout settings.
Youtube search feature
You want to hear that one song, but don’t have it? No worries, AV Mix Master can search YouTube as well, so if it’s available on YouTube, it’s available to you! Here’s how.
Searching in general
Searching in AV Mix Master is easy, just type the artist and/or title and hit ENTER on the keyboard. AV Mix Master will help you by autocompleting your entries if possible. Have a look here:
We want to find “Grenade” from “Bruno Mars”. We simply type “brun” and AutoComplete will give us a few possibilities. Indeed, the second one is the one we want. You can use the arrow keys to go there and then hit ENTER on your keyboard and AV Mix Master will show you the results. You can also simply click the entry you want and the search will kick-in as well. If you don’t use the AutoComplete suggestions you might want to hit ENTER as well, without selecting any of the options. In that case “brun” will be looked up in these fields: artist, title, album name. Let’s forget about AutoComplete and hit ENTER. This will result in a search showing us all media entries containing “brun”:
The search finished and resulted in 13 items. As we can see, we found a lot of “Bruno Mars” (which we wanted), but also “Tyrone Brunson” and “Nell’Aria Bruna”. No problem, we found what we wanted. AV Mix Master will show results ordered by rating. In this case “Grenade” by Bruno Mars was listed on top of the list, because it has 4 stars as a rating. The Yellow/Gold stars mean that they were given by a user and not automatically by the system. In other words, someone has rated that song 4 stars. The others (all 3 blue stars) are not rated by a user and were also not auto-rated by the system (the system will auto-rate songs if you play them more than a few times). The columns shown are self-explanatory, however here’s a short introduction:
- Artist: shows the artist if found or [Unknown] if no artist was found in the tags of the track. With YouTube results, this field is filtered from the title.
- Title: shows the title from the tags
- Length: duration of the track (sometimes shows 00:00 on videos if the video tags don’t give back duration; these videos will still play though)
- Rating: shows 1 to 5 stars in either Yellow/Gold or Blue. Blue means automatically rated (all songs start with 3 blue stars). Yellow means rated by the user (2 to 5 stars). A red star is 1 star only (meaning you really don’t like that song).
- Album Title
- Tr.: Track Number of the track within the album
- PC: PlayCount of the song. AV Mix Master will keep track of how many times a song is played. NOTE: if AutoFill / AutoPlay is used AV Mix Master will play items by itself; that will increase the playcount as well, however, AV Mix Master has separate counters for automated play or user play. This counter however, shows the sum of both autoplay and userplay count.
- Extra Information: any extra information like playcounters,etc.
You can click on any column header to sort the list by that column. Clicking it again, sorts it in reverse.
Searching for something you don’t have / YouTube
In the case above, we found Bruno Mars, however, what if we wanted that song where he want’s to be a millionaire? It seems we don’t have it or do we?
If a song cannot be found locally (i.e. you don’t have it), AV Mix Master will try to find it on YouTube. In this case we typed “bruno mars millionair” and AV Mix Master gives AutoComplete suggestions from YouTube. We simply hit ENTER to let AV Mix Master show us the YouTube results:
We got 12 results. Notice that the rating is 1 red star. This means that the results really don’t match the search very well (we searched for “bruno mars” with “millionaire”) but we get results about a billionaire. Well, that’s our fault, but no worries, the results were actually what we wanted. Youtube searches orders the results by play count, which means that the most played version is on top of the list (played 14,590,778 times). That’s our match. Simply drag it to the playlist or one of the players to start it. Note that if we had searched for “billionaire” the ratings would have been more yellowish to indicate better matches. Ratings for Youtube videos give a small indication on how good the match would be to your search.
Click any of the results to show a screenshot and extra information in the information pane:
Playing Youtube videos in AV Mix Master
AV Mix Master uses an internal internet browser to play YouTube videos. This browser is located in the kiosk. If a Youtube video needs to be played, AV Mix Master will start it in the kiosk. If the kiosk is not shown, you don’t see the video. However, you will hear the sound anyway. AV Mix Master will make the “Kiosk” button orange to notify you of a video playing. Simply clicking it, will show the kiosk with the video.
YouTube Playback Issues
For YouTube videos to work in AV Mix Master you need to have Adobe Flash installed in Internet Explorer. Even if you use another browser (e.g. Firefox, Chrome) you still need to start Internet Explorer once and get Flash installed (http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/).
Always Plays Feature
AV Mix Master will never let you down: it keeps on playing and playing until you want it to stop. No more sudden and awkward silences. Here’s how it works.
As soon as you click Play, AutoFill will kick-in using the last used genre. If no genre was selected, “All Music” is used and AV Mix Master will start playing random songs from that playlist. Your screen would something like this:
In this case the genre “Pop” was selected and both the players were filled with tracks from that genre. Player 1 (the left upper player) was started. The track order is as follows:
- Now Playing: Billy Joel – Goodnight Saigon
- Coming up next: Sting & The Police – Roxanne ‘97
- After that: Billy Ocean – When The Going Gets Tough
- After that: Shapeshifters – Incredible
- Etcetera; all items from the playlist will be played in that order
Once the playlist is empty, it will automatically fill again using the same genre as was selected earlier. The playlist will be refilled using AutoFill once a player ends a song and needs a new one. During that time, a “wait” icon will show, indicating that AutoFill is in progress. Since AV Mix Master keeps track of what was played using play counters and last play dates, AV Mix Master will never use previously played tracks again. That is, until all tracks have been played; in that case AV Mix Master will restart at the beginning of all tracks in that genre. You can optionally set if AV Mix Master will play randomly after that moment or if it will play according to last play date (in that case AV Mix Master will play in the same order as before).
Playing something outside of the playlist
Dragging songs in one of the players
Every once in a while you want to hear a specific track. You can simply search for any track and drag and drop that track to a player. If you dragged it to the currently playing player, that player will immediately eject its current song and start playing the song you had dragged in. The playlist is not affected whatsoever. If you dragged the song into the inactive player (i.e. the player that is not currently playing), the tracks that was supposed to play will be put back into the playlist (on top of the playlist). Your song will now be inserted into that player. The playlist is therefore not affected.
Dragging songs in the playlist
If you drag the song into the playlist while AutoFill is active, AutoFill will be deactivated. You can see this behavior since the playlist empties immediately when you move your mouse during the drag operation into the playlist. Simply move out of the playlist and it will magically re-appear. If you had dragged the song into the playlist, that song would play in the future and if the playlist is empty again, AutoFill will kick-in again using the last known parameters.
However, if you really don’t want to remove the AutoFill playlist, you can select the “Check” button to keep its contents. If you do so, the tracks will remain in the playlist, however AutoFill is turned off; the same as you would have made this playlist yourself.
To control AutoFill behavior you have several in-screen options:
- You can select the genre AutoFill will be using by clicking the genre (in the case Pop) after which you can select any genre and AutoFill will refill the playlist based on your choice
- You can select or deselect “Use Youtube videos if media not found locally”; if checked, Youtuve videos will be used for every item that AutoFill suggests but you don’t have locally in your own media library. If unchecked, AutoFill will only use your local media library entries. Note: internet suggestions might result in zero items if your media library does not contain any items that were suggested.
- Refill tracks: removes the current items in the playlist and refills the playlist with other random items
- Keep playlist: turns off AutoFill whilst keeping the entries shown in the playlist
- Remove Playlist: turns off AutoFill and removes the playlist completely
Local AutoFill versus Internet AutoFill
AutoFill can use both local settings or more dynamic internet suggestions. It’s up to you (provided you have internet connection of course). You can see the difference through the icons:
The earth globe icon is in front of every internet genre and the start is used in front of local suggestions. Here is how it works:
Internet Genres
AV Mix Master will ask around 15 tracks from the AV Soft service provider. It will then try to match all these suggestions to your local database items. If it can match them, AV Mix Master will use the most played or the most favored track. If it cannot find a match in your local database, AV Mix Master will try to find a match on Youtube (only if checked “Use Youtube video if media not found”) and it will use that match. If it has more than at least two matches, AV Mix Master will show the results in the playlist. If it cannot find enough matches in one run, AV Mix Master will get another 15 items and starts the process again.
The internet genres are continuously updated and will result in different matches all the time. AV Mix Master will not repeat playback of entries that were played in the last 24 hours
Local Genres
If local genres are used, AV Mix Master will select music based on genres of the tracks and the number of stars a track has. The settings can be changed in the “Options” dialog under “AutoFill”. “All Music” for instance, plays all items, except for “Christmas” items with a rating of at least 3 stars. Easy Listening in this case, would play only songs from the genres “Easy Listening”, “Slow” and “Romantic”.
AutoFill Settings
You can change your local AutoFill settings in the settings dialog of AV Mix Master. Here is how:
- Click the Options button in the upper left corner of the main window
- The click Settings and in the options dialog choose “AutoFill” on the left side
The options for AutoFill look like this:
In this case we have selected the “Easy Listening” genre. We have selected “Easy Listening” and “Jazz” in the genres selection box. That box is filled with all genres found in your local media library database. We also selected to “include these genres” so that the checked genres will be included rather than excluded in the AutoFill genre. We have selected a minimum rating of 3 stars and left the other options a default. You might want to click “Check Results” to make sure that this AutoFill Genre will actually have items to play before going on. All local AutoFill Genres are shown in the AutoFill box in the main screen.
Turn on AutoFill
Sometimes you want to turn on AutoFill even when your own playlist is still playing. No problem, just select the playlist from the toolbar:
Fallback Playlist
If AutoFill is unable to find any tracks, it will revert to the FallBack playlist. This playlist will have all media tracks with a rating of 3 or more. This might happen if your internet genre suggestions have all been played in the last 24 hours. Or if your media library is very small and does not contain any of the matched an Internet Genre might suggest (and you have Match Youtube unchecked). If this happens, simply correct the problem by either increasing the number of items in your media library or by turning on the checkbox to match Youtube videos.
Problems
Most problems related to AutoFill are caused by:
- Your Media Library is empty or otherwise contains too few items. Fix this by filling your media library, ripping CDs or otherwise acquire music
- Your AutoFill Genres are not set correctly. For instance, you have changed the All Music Genre to only contain items rated with 5 stars while you don’t have any. Check the results in the options dialog.
Name That Tune
AV Music game is a "Name That Tune" game that will allow up to 4 players to play several games on your own music library. You can select any playlist to narrow down the music to your likings (80′s, 90′s, well-known, etc.).
Download AV Music Game
To use AV Music Game you need to download the setup file and install it:
Name That TuneHow does it work?
1. Start the application (Start / All Programs / AV Music Game) 
In the main screen you can add or change players and select the playlist. You can also view the high scores of previous attempts. You can use the remote, keyboard or mouse to navigate in the menu structure. The remote or keyboard arrow keys will move the hightlighted button and the Return or OK key will select that button. The X in the right top corner will quit AV Music Game.
TIP: You can use a media center remote control to enter names or navigate the menu!
2. Add Players 
Add Players by typing their names in the text field and then select "Add". You can use the remote control’s triple tap function to enter names with its numeric keypad. Up to 4 players can play. TIP: More than 4 players? Make teams! More fun and faster game play!
Click "Done" to go back to the main screen.
3. Select a playlist 
In the "Select Playlist" screen you can select your own playlist (any playlist you have created in Windows Media Player or Media Center will do). You can also select "All Music" and then you use the star rating system to select the preferences. 4 and 5 stars are given to music that you play a lot or to music you have given these ratings to yourself.
The "How many songs?" button will give you an estimate on how many songs your currently selected playlist contains. You probably want to have more than 20 songs per player (anything above 100 is cool), since otherwise you may get the same music questions over and over again.
TIP: Use the Windows Media Player Auto Playlist feature to compose great playlists using automatic rating, year of release, playcount, etc.
Click "Done" to go back to the main screen.
4. Ready, Set, Go!
You are now ready to start AV Music Game, by pressing the "Start Game" button. AV Music Game may need a few seconds to retrieve music files and organize them, but then the first game will start.
Game Play
All games will start with a "Get Ready" screen. This screen shows you the current score, the game that is about to be played and a short description of the game. Of course it will show which player is up (or all players in those types of games).
After a short period of time, the game will continue with the actual game (in this case the Sample Game). The user must guess in a specific amount of time, which artist (for 5 points) and which title (also for 5 points) is currently playing. If he or she knows the answer, he or she pushes the OK button to answer.
When the game is in "Answer mode" the music stops playing and the player needs to say his answer to anyone in the room. To check the answer, the user (or jury, i.e. somebody else) presses the "Jury" button. The "Jury" button will show the "Jury screen" that allows for an answer check.
In this case the answer should be "The Weather Girls" with "It’s raining men". If the player had both the title and artist correct, the jury presses "Correct" for 10 points. Only one answer correct (only the title or the artist) is a partial answer (press partial for 5 points). And if the answer was completely incorrect, you should press the "Wrong" button for 0 points.
After the jury has decided on the correctness of the answer, the game will move to the "Round Results" screen. This screen shows the scores, the song that was played and the amount of points that was won. You can pause in here or you can add the currently playing song to a playlist (press "Add to playlist" button; it will show "Added" if the song was added. The songs are added to the playlist with this name: "AV Music Game Favorites".
Then a bonus game pops up "Get the Picture", see explanation below. This game is again for the same player. After that the game will select another player and the game continues until the last game.
The Games
AV Music Game has several game modes which are explained here:
Sample Game
The sample game will play 8 seconds from somewhere in the middle of the song. It is up to you to guess the artist for 5 points and the title for 5 points, for a grand total of 10 points.
Intro Game
The Intro Game will play 15 seconds from the start of a song. Same points as in the Sample Game
Letter Game (bonus game for all players)
Do you know the wheel of fortune? Then you know this game as well. The game starts with 50 points and a randomly selected artist with a title (from that artist) separated by a dash (-). Every second an empty box will show a letter and the points that can be earned will be distracted by a few points. The first player that knows the answer should say his or her name and the jury (the one with the remote) should press OK (or RETURN on the keyboard). The game will stop and the player must say the answer within 10 seconds. If the user answered correctly (use the Jury button) he or she will get the amount of points that was left. However, if the answer was wrong, he or she will lose that number of points.
Get the picture
This game will reveal a part of an album cover if the user presses OK to stop the moving box. If the player pressed stop while the moving box was on top of the asterisk (*) he or she will get 10 bonus points. After the part is revealed he or she can try to guess the album title or album artist for the remaining bonus points. BE CAREFUL: an incorrect answer will lose you the bonus points!
Fix Speed
The Fix Speed game will play a random song in the false speed (either too slow or too fast, but never the correct speed). It is up to the player to fix the speed to match the original speed. Listen carefully and use the Up-button or Down-button to increase or decrease the speed by 3%. Press the Answer button if you think that the speed is correct. You can earn 20 points if the speed was exactly correct, 10 points if you were off by 3% (either too fast or too slow) and 5 points for a 6% margin.
More Information
Since this game will use your own media library, the game is as good as its contents. Album art that is used in "Get The Picture" is also retrieved from your library and while I do a great many checks to ensure the album art is valid, the game can never be sure. Therefore it’s a good idea to check your media library (using Album Art Fixer perhaps).
If you like the game and would like to donate, you are more than welcome. This game was written by me in my spare time and feedback (not only by transfer of money, but also mail feedback) is greatly appreciated.
If you want to donate, use PayPal and click the button below. Thank you very much!
NOTE: In several screen you will find a "Pause/Exit" button. Press this button to pause the game (bath room breaks, getting a beer from the fridge, etc.). You can also use the Quit button in this screen to prematurely end the game. 
Prerequisites
- .Net Framework 3.5
- Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7
- Windows Media Player 9 or higher
How to remove duplicates in AV Mix Master?
Many users of AV Mix Master have enormous amounts of music and video files on their PCs. In many cases these files may contain duplicates of other files. An example is shown below after a user has searched for the song “heartbeat” from “Enrique Iglesias”:
As you can see, this search resulted in two identical results. It seems that this user has two copies of this song in his database (and thus on his computer). You might deduct that this is only one song of many; this user might have the complete albums twice. Let’s check for that:
Indeed, this album is found twice on our PC. To get rid of one of these albums, you could do the following steps:
WARNING:
Removing files from the AV Mix Master media library will also delete these files from your computer. Make a back-up first to be on the safe side.
1. Right-click any track and click on “Select” and then on “Select File In Explorer”
2. An Explorer windows shows the album in question
3. Repeat step 1 for the other match (in this case “Ayer” on the second line) and notice that Explorer opens a second windows with that file selected
4. Now you can decide which one of the CDs you want to remove from your computer (and eventually your media library). You may want to base your decision on a few property differences between both CDs: bitrate, album art, etcetera.
5. In this case we will delete the one without album art. After we have deleted these files (you may want to delete the complete folder if it only contained this album), AV Mix Master will see that the files are deleted and it will fix its library accordingly (NOTE: this only happens if these files are being watched by AV Mix Master). If AV Mix Master did not pick up the change, you can simply try to select the missing file in the AV Media Library and AV Mix Master will give you an error message that the file is no longer available (in that case AV Mix Master will purge the library for these files). You should see something like this:
6. Click Search again to verify that now only one album is available:
7. That’s it. We now have manually removed duplicate files (in this case an album) form your computer and your media library.
How to automate the search for duplicate files?
In the example above, we manually removed the duplicate files. However, if your media library contains more that 50,000 files or so, this process would get tedious. AV Mix Master can help you out by automated duplicate finding functionality. Here is how:
1. Search for all files by using the percentage sign (%) in the search box. AV Mix Master will show your entire media library.
2. Now right-click any one of the tracks shown in the results and click “Select” “Duplicates (Artist, Title, Duration, Album)”. AV Mix Master will now iterate through this list and select all files (except for the first) that is a duplicate based on these criteria:
- Artist matched exactly
- Title matched exactly
- Duration matched exactly
- Album name matched exactly
3. After the operation finished, all duplicate files based on the criteria above are selected in the results window. Note that you may not see any selected file, since these might be lower in the list. You can scroll using the scrollbar to see any of these selected files. NOTE: do not click the mouse anywhere in the results window at this point, since you reset the selected files by doing so.
4. Find any selected item and right-click that item and click “Delete…” and confirm the warning.
NOTE: these files are removed from your hard drive as well, so you may want to consider making a back-up first!
Tips & Tricks
- Make a back-up first!
- Start small (use one artist first by searching for that album) so you can get familiar with the process before moving on to the rest of the library.
Welcome to AV Soft
Welcome to AV Soft’s website for 2011. While we are busy moving our website to the new system, you may want to check out the old website at http://www.avsoft.nl/site/oldsite.php. Thanks for your patience and enjoy AV Soft’s new website. Below a short introduction to AV Mix Master.
AV Media Copy for Windows Media Player
Welcome to AV Media Copy for WMP
AV Media Copy allows you to copy the media items contained in a playlist to a specific target location. You can then transfer these files to a CD, DVD or a music player device. You can also copy the CD back to another computer and copy the files back to that computer. The main difference between WMP’s sync and copy actions are that Media Copy also copies the album art and maintains the folder structure to support that album art!
Key benefits:
- Copies to every location you wish
- Copies album art as well
- Maintains the folder structure/hierarchy as Windows Media Player uses
DISCLAIMER: Respect copyright!
Download the application here before you go on.
Latest version: 1.0
How does it work?
1. Start the application (Start / All Programs / AV Media Copy) and the wizard shows its first screen: 
2. Click Next to show the playlists from your media library
Select the playlist from which you want to copy its media items and click Next
3. The playlist is being read and the contents are shown. You can now unselect the items you do not wish to copy.
NOTE: if you have to unselect a lot of item, reconsider making another playlist in Windows Media Player first! And then use the new playlist.
4. In the next screen you can specify the target location of your copy action. You can use the "Browse…" button to open up a "Choose Folder" dialog or you can type the location by hand. Valid locations look like:
c:\data\music
d:\my music
\\computer02\share01
You can also check or uncheck options here:
- Use Media Folder Structure: this option will create directories in your target location resembling the album artist and album title. This helps to keep your media together and also helps album and folder art in that it only applies to the correct media
- Copy Album Art: this option will check all album art that belongs to a file. It will then copy these files to the same location to where the file itself is copied
Click Next to continue
5. Check the settings you have made in the previous step and click "Next" to start the copy action.
6. Copy in progress:
The copy action may take a while depending on the amount of files you wish to copy. For all media items, the track title is shown followed by the amount of files is copied. Depending on the "Copy Album Art" setting and the amount of album art files found, this number may be between 1 and 5 (the media file itself is 1, folder.jpg is 2, AlbumArtSmall.jpg is 3, AlbumArt_GUID_Large.jpg is 4, AlbumArt_GUID_Small.jpg is 5).
You can click "Cancel" to stop the copy action.
7. Finished!
If no error occurred, the Finished dialog shows and after you click Finish, the target folder opens up, so you can check your new copied files. In case of an error, a link is shown on the Finish page specifying the log file. Check the log for the word "Error" to see what you need to fix.
The folder below shows the copied files using the "Use Media Folder Structure" and "Copy Album Art" options turned on.
What’s Next?
You can now copy the target files to a CD or DVD and take it to another computer. Just simply copy them to that computer’s hard disk and run Windows Media Player. Select Tools/Search (or press F3) and point to the location you copied your files to. The new files will be added to that computer’s media library.
If you already copied to a network location, you simply need to search the files in Windows Media Player so they are added to the library
Media Import
The Finish-screen mentions AV Mix Master Media Import, however, that program is not yet released. It is considered to be the counter part of this program and will release together with AV Mix Master in the next version of AV Mix Master.
Prerequisites
- .Net Framework 1.1
- Windows Media Player 9 or higher
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