Windows media player problems?

irish91983 · 12 Sep 2010

Hi All

I hope this is in the correct place. I'm new to the forum.
I have a couple of questions on windows media player 12

1. When i start up WMP it does it check to make sure its all good, at the bottom left of WMP where is tells you that its updating or getting info. Mine will always retrieving info for unknown album. When I go to see my unknown album there is one 2 albums one I have music in and the other is blank it will let me right click on it and select delete but it will not delete.

2. I have all my music store on a external hard drive and all has been find. But when I started WMP last night I noticed that some of my songs from a few albums were missing. I went into manage libraries and the same folders were still selected and I hit ok WMP said update complete but songs were still missing.

Is there any way to fix these problems?
Thanks in advanced
Keith

Gornot · 12 Sep 2010

Hi, and welcome to SevenForums.

Every time you start WMP it will try to update its library to see if you have saved some new media files since the previous session with WMP, this is a common feature.

As fasr as "getting info" goes, you can disable WMP from retrieving metadata from the internet and changing your tags, but the way I see it, the problem you have is greater. Many people don't realize that before you delete something from the HDD, you need to delete it from the WMP library first, because indexing libraries in Windows and WMP is the same thing.

So here's what you should do.

First, if you wish, you can disable WMP from retrieving media information from the internet; if not, you can skip this step:
1. Open WMP
2. Go to Organize -> Options
3. Click the Library tab
4. Uncheck "Retrieve additional information from the Internet"
4. Apply -> OK

The best thing to do next would be to rebuild your whole WMP library in order to get rid of those files you deleted from your HDD (I assume):
1. Shutdown WMP
2. Stop the media sharing service. Go to Start-> type "Services" into search and click "Services". Right-click on the “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service” and select Stop.
3. Navigate to “X:\Users\(your username)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player" (X is your Windows partition). Now delete the files named CurrentDatabase_***.wmdb and LocalMLS_*.wmdb.
4. Start the media sharing service.
5. Now start Windows Media Player and build up your library again.

As far as "missing songs" go, I have experienced the same thing when forcing update of WMP libraries, and have found that the songs were actually deleted from the HDD itself. One more reason to try and restructure and rebuild your WMP library from scratch, instead of forcing updates and new folders to a corrupted library.

irish91983 · 14 Sep 2010

Thanks for the info. But I always will delete it from WMP frist before I delete it from any where else. I think maybe I will start it over again. The missing song problem I tried to click and drag a song over to the album where it belongs and then all of a sudden they all came back. But I think Im going to try and start over. Thanks for the help.

Keith

Gornot · 14 Sep 2010

No problem, lad, let us know if you worked things out