Windows 7: WMP 12 is moving/combining albums

My WMP 12 library is acting up. It is taking albums by different artists (sometimes the whole album, sometimes just a single song) and combining them together into one big album called "Unknown Album" by "Unknown Artist".

Any album/song it takes no longer exists anywhere else in the library... a whole album disappears, or a song or two is gone from the middle of another album.

I tried restoring the library... it comes back the same way.



I went directly to my music folder and checked the file structure, and everything is OK there... every artist has his own folder, the album is in the folder, the songs are on the album. Everything is in its proper place with its proper name... all structured exactly like every other music file.

There is no rhyme or reason to this. Some of this music is new, some old. Some ripped from CDs, some downloaded from Amazon. Some has been played as recently as yesterday, some untouched for a year.

Questions: How can I get these back in the right place... when as far as I can tell, they already are? How can I get WMP to never do this again? And why the *bleep* would it do it in the first place??!!??

Sorry MS... WMP 12 is a buggy piece of crap and a big step down from both 10 and 11.

You are right about WMP12.

Have you checked the details tabs of the files that are being moved?
When I first tried using WMP12, it "helpfully" renamed 900/3600 mp3s on my HDD (even though the mp3s were set to "Read only").

In my experience, you have to have artist data in both artist fields in the file properties details tab.

I use Winamp for music because of my bad experiences with WMP12.
WMP10 on XP is "perfect" when compared to WMP12 on Windows 7.

Additional
I also experienced a problem which was related to the ID3 tags.
Windows didn't like any files that used the latest version (ID3v2.4).

I double checked, and everything has the correct name in both "Artist" and "Album Artist". But all of these moved files have ID3v2.4 tags... should I roll them back?

It was the ID3v2.4 tags. I retagged everything and excluded v2.4, then rebuilt the music library, and everything is back where it belongs. Thanks for the tip about v2.4 tags!

I suppose the only bit of advice I can give you here is use windows media player to search for ID3 tags automatically, it worked a treat in vista and XP, not so sure about 7 as I've migrated to iTunes for my music needs, seems to be a better interface and feels less cluttered :-)

I had been relying on WMP 12 to set the type of tag, but it wasn't able to read some of them... and it chose them itself!

I'll probably use MP3tag from now on to set the type (ID3, APE, etc...). I already use it to correct album/song info like release dates, spelling, etc... and I find it to be quick, clean, and accurate.

Thanks, though!

I'm glad that info about tags was useful.