Automatic Playback of Archived Content

Zoom Player is capable of automatically extracting multiple archive formats and playing their contents automatically. Zoom Player does this by using external 3rd party tools, making it possible to extract any archive format as long as a command line tool is available to do the job.

Zoom Player is pre-configured to support the popular (and free) file compression suite 7-Zip. 7-Zip can extract nearly every archive format (with the exception of ALBW).

Zoom Player assumes that 7-Zip is installed under "c:\Program Files\7-Zip\" (or the language equivalent of the "Program Files" folder. If 7-Zip is not installed in this folder, each format's extension must be edited to reflect the updated 7-Zip path.

To configure archive playback, open the "Advanced Options / Playback / Paths & Files" dialog. The "Archive Playback" dialog lists the currently supported Archive file formats.

To extract the ALBW (AlbumWrap) format, Zoom Player is pre-configured to use the Open-Source Mp3splt project to extract the files. Zoom Player assumes the "mp3splt.exe" ALBW extraction tool is installed in "c:\program files\ALBW\". Modify the ALBW entry if it's installed elsewhere.

To add support for additional formats, such as the Comic book CBZ/CBR formats (Which are actually renamed ZIP/RAR extensions), click on the "Add" button. When prompted for an extension, type "CBZ". You will be prompted for a command line next. With 7-Zip, you can use the following command line:
"c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" x "%n" "-o%p"

The %n and %p tags represent the File Name and Target Path to extract (Zoom Player automatically fills these tags to real values on run time).

When adding new archive format, remember to add the new Archive file Extension to the Zoom Player Archive extension list (Advanced Options / File Format Association / File Extension), otherwise Zoom Player will not list the new archive extension in file browsing and media library interfaces.

There are two settings related to Archive playback
The first is "Hide extraction window". When enabled, Zoom Player hides the console window used to extract the archive. The only reason not to use this setting is when extracting archives containing a password.

The second is "Allow EXT anywhere in name". When enabled, Zoom Player identifies archive file extensions that are part of the base file name as a valid archive format. For example, with this setting enabled, Zoom Player detects a file named "myalbum.zip.mp3" as a ZIP archive and a file named "cooltracks.albw.mp3" as an ALBW AlbumWrap archive while a file named "zipididuda.mp3" is correctly identified as an ".mp3" audio file.