New
#1
Media Player cannot recognise an existing library
Several years ago I embarked on the task of digitising my music collection. I acquired the tools for converting the analog signal from my record player or tape deck into digital form, cleaning up the resulting ".wav" file to remove the noise and finally splitting it down into individual tracks and converting them to ".wma" format to match files "ripped" from CDīs.
The resulting individual track files are named Track sequence + Track title and held in folders having the Album name. Neat and tidy and WMP 8, 9 and 10 could read them quite happily.
However, these versions of WMP could not differentiate between various versions of the same piece of music and simply gathers up and stuffs into the library everything that has an audio extension even recordings of noisy meetings and Police interviews.
A typical 12" vinyl record being digitised produces Side1.wav, Side2.wav, Sides 1+2.wav, depopped Sides 1+2.wav, Track1.wav, track2.wav ...............Track11.wav, Track12.wav and finally Tracks 1 to 12.wma. All of these get pulled into the library - five copies of the same piece of music. It is prudent to keep the .wav files as backup but they donīt belong in the library
When I began to organise the files ripped from CDīs I was horrified to find them completely incognito, the file name is simply the track number in a folder named unknown album plus the date and time of itīs creation and itself a sub-folder the folder Unknown Artist. Useless
I deleted everything that had been ripped and started afresh renaming everything.
I now have -
My Music, Artists, Album, Album Track1 Track2 etc. Unknown Artist, Various Artists.
and this works perfectly under WMP 10 because the only audio files it has access to are those on the USB drive.
Recently, two machines have died and been replaced by machines pre-loaded with Windows 7 and including WMP 12. Show this an existing library, mine has 6,095 tracks in 393 albums, it picks up ten albums at random and says that there is only one track in each.
To play music I have to find the album I want to hear using Windows explorer, highlight the tracks I want to play then right click and select "Play". The front screen is fine without the swirling patterns of earlier versions but the rest is useless. Reading through other posts I gather that WMP12 follows the previous versions in building itīs own library but instead of using locations it copies files across to itīs own drive. This is not acceptable behaviour for me - so
Is there a way of saying to WMP12, "My Music is on Drive x, donīt mess about copying it just use it"?.
or - have I to discard WMP12 and install WMP10?
Last edited by Bazrev; 15 Aug 2012 at 02:28. Reason: Punctuation needed