Windows Media Player Library problems

This infuriates me.

For the record, I'm running the latest version of Windows Media Player on 64-bit Windows 7.

WMP 12's library function has always been a bit wonky for me. I've had trouble adding album art and ID3 tags to music I ripped off-line in the past, but the whole thing has gone ridiculously screwy now.

Lately, WMP has refused to recognize any changes I make to either the ID3 tags or the actual location of music files. If I have music in one folder (say, a general folder for the odd iTunes download for an artist that I only have one or two songs from), and then later move it to an artist-specific folder, the player refuses to acknowledge the file's existence, even if I manually delete the old file from the library add the new one. The player continues to try to play the file from the old folder (which is, of course, impossible).

Lately it also seems that albums have been splitting into two separate folders within the "Albums" view in WMP. One of the albums will be with art, the other without.

Just today I noticed that a bunch of songs in my library have doubled themselves, so now in the playlists instead of one copy of a song, there is now two.

I've tried reinstalling the whole damn application from microsoft.com, and it seemed to help for a while before things went screwy again. I really like the aesthetic appeal of WMP 12 and just about everything else about it. The thing would be perfect, if it actually worked. I've tried both Winamp and iTunes and to be honest they both turn me off immensely from a visual/navigation standpoint. I use iTunes to buy music, and to convert songs into .m4a when I need to, but as a media player it just doesn't do it for me. I'd like to continue using WMP if at all possible.

In summary, my problems are as follows:

- Unable to add, remove, or change ID3 tags of any file within the player. If I change them outside WMP, WMP refuses to acknowledge that any such change has occured.

- Unable to delete or add any file from or to the library.

- Unable to add or change album art.

- Doubled songs within playlists.

- Unable to change any song's physical location on the hard drive without WMP losing track and getting confused.

- Albums splitting in two within WMP.

- Also, WMP stopped adding music to the library automatically about a week ago, though it continues to occasionally flash something along the lines of "Updating music library" in the bottom right corner.


If anyone has any suggestions on how to fix any or all of these problems, I would be greatly appreciative. Sorry for going on so long.

Reply 1 : Windows Media Player Library problems

Just one. Be sure to turn off that rearrange my music and that other item about replacing music information. Some find that annoying to troublesome. Let me see if I can find a picture about it.

Bob

-> http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/askville/4788804_6813599_mywrite/capture.jpg

Reply 2 : Windows Media Player Library problems

Thanks for the reply. I always have the "rearrange" option turned off but I do usually leave the "replace media information" option on because, as I said, I have a lot of music that I've ripped off-line that do not have ID3 tags. I've turned that one off as well, so I'll let you know if it works.

Thanks again.