Stupid, Stupid Windows XP and CDROMs

While I don’t use XP all the time, I use it enough to know it sucks slightly less than some of it’s compediters. However, last night something came up that really made me go “hmmm.” Actually it was more like “%$@$$#@ XP POS mother @#$^%@@!!!!!”, but that’s not the point.


I’ve finally gotten around to starting to rip all my CDs to ogg vorbis. I have also started submitting the CD IDs to the musicbrainz server. Basically you put in an audio CD, the (windows) software reads and creates a unique CD ID number for that CD, lets you associate it with song information (or get it from freedb or enter it yourself), and then stores it so that the information is there should someone want to look up that same CD.


This is a long and boring process involving putting a CD in the drive, clicking the “Submit CD” button, and then either ejecting the CD (if the CD ID is in there already) or searching for the artist and album, clicking submit, and then ejecting the CD.


XP, in all it’s glory and wisdom, pops up a dialog when you put in a CD, asking what you’d like to do:


  • Play the CD
  • Copy music from the CD
  • Open the folder
  • Take No Action
  • [x] always do this

I of course, not wanting to be pissed off, selected the last option, Take No Action. I thought that this would mean that XP would not pop up the dialog every time. However, in actual fact it means “pop up the same dialog each time, with the ‘take no action’ option highlighted.”


At least other OSs do things differently.


  • Mac OS/X – play the CD regardless of what you want
  • Linux – do nothing, as you have to know some cryptic command to just access it [1]
  • Windows 9x – crash immediately

Bah.


[1] Actually, redhat 9 just starts to play the CD. If you put in a CD with both audio and data on it it is smart enough to ask you if you’d like to view the CD or play it.