Similar issue: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40889068

With step 3 you need to open a "Developer Command Prompt for VS 2022", as per README. You get this if you have Visual Studio 2022 installed, with the components for C++ development. My local Visual Studio installation looks like the following:

• Downloaded from: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/de/downloads/
• Installed:
  • Visual Studio Build Tools 2022
  • Visual Studio Community 2022
• Workloads for "Visual Studio Build Tools 2022" (selectable under "Modify" > "Workloads")
  • Desktop & Mobile: Desktop development with C++ (install)
• Workloads for "Visual Studio Community 2022" (selectable under "Modify" > "Workloads")
  • Desktop & Mobile: .NET desktop development (likely not necessary)
  • Desktop & Mobile: Desktop development with C++ (install)
  • Linux and embedded development with C++ (likely not necessary)

After installation search for "developer command prompt for VS 2022" in your Start Menu and open it, then try the commands again. I have attached a screenshot of my output, a copy of it in txt format and the output of chrome://version in txt format.

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding the requester to the CC list.

Looks good, nothing was missed. Point 6 is the bad behaviour I intended to report. The expected result would be contents of "navigator.mediaSession.metadata.album": "Face Value" in my example, "Pushpa The Rise Part - 01 (Hindi)" in your second screencast. Chromium should report the album name to the operating system, so that other applications can not only see title and artist, but also the album name, if the web page reports it.

The original reason for creating this issue is that the desktop application for "TIDAL" (a music streaming service), which is built on Electron and consequently Chromium, does not report any album information to the operating system, even though their application reports it to the browser window. I have reported this issue first with TIDAL here: https://github.com/orgs/tidal-music/discussions/74. A TIDAL developer has confirmed that their application is reporting the album name to the browser window and that there is nothing they can do on their end.

I have run msd.exe while playing music with the Amazon Music desktop application and the Deezer desktop application, which I presume are built on Electron/Chromium as well, and they too do not report any album information, the album title is just empty ("<empty>" in the output). You can try this yourself. Download TIDAL, Amazon Music or Deezer and play some music while you're running msd.exe. You will see that no album title is reported by the application.

Fixing this issue would result in those media players that are built on Electron/Chromium to be able to report the album title to Windows and make it available for other applications to query/read this information (like my example code/msd.exe does).

Edit: I do not have Spotify Premium, but Spotify might be affected by this too, if it is built on Chromium too and relies on Chromium to forward media information to the desktop. Unfortunately Spotify Premium is required for Spotify to report song information to the Windows desktop. Spotify Free does not report anything (not even title or artist), so be aware of that if you test msd.exe with Spotify. If someone could test msd.exe with Spotify Premium and post the results, that might be insightful (presuming that Spotify uses Chromium under the hood too, which isn't too unlikely, I reckon).

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding the requester to the CC list.

I'm working on making an application to display MediaSession info on an external piece of display hardware.

I encountered this while using YouTube Music on Chrome version 128.0.6613.113. It seems that most of the info is set to default values (empty string, empty array, or 0) with the exception of artist, playback_type, thumbnail, and title.

{'album_artist': '', 
'album_title': '', 
'album_track_count': 0, 
'artist': 'Black Country, New Road', 
'genres': [], 
'playback_type': <MediaPlaybackType.MUSIC: 1>, 
'subtitle': '', 
'thumbnail': <_winsdk_Windows_Storage_Streams.IRandomAccessStreamReference object at 0x0000022AA18484B0>, 
'title': 'Snow Globes', 
'track_number': 0}