William Stanek: Tweaking your music library for Windows Media Player 12 on Windows 7

William here. So here I sit absolutely rocking to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, thanks to Windows Media Player 12 and Windows 7. Hearing every note and chord in Dolby Surround 5.1. How cool is that?

 

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Yeah, I’m loving it. It sounds great, but it took a bit of work to get here. Why? Well, I’m happy to tell you why. Here’s what happened:

As I let you know in my last WMP 12 post, I previously used iTunes for my music library. I like the AAC and MP4 formats and that’s where I could use them, and I did. When WMP 12 came along and gave me the option of using AAC and MP4, I decided to switch over to WMP 12. The import process, as I discussed, worked well. My large library was sucked into WMP 12 and everything was good. There were a few hiccups, however, and these mostly had to do with the differences between the way iTunes stores album/song information and the way WMP 12 does.

After importing my media, I found the album covers and some of the music information wasn’t available. Normally, that’s a simple fix as the metadata is imported (in most cases) eventually. You can help metadata application along by clicking Organize and selecting Apply Media Information Changes. Either way, your options settings will determine how successful this process is.

You can review your options settings by clicking Organize and selecting Options. On the Library tab of the Options dialog box, a few specific options, highlighted in the figure below, control how media information is obtained and applied.

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You must allow information retrieval to get metadata. And if you allow retrieval, you can either add only missing information or allow media information to be overwritten. Allowing only missing information to be added may get some of your album covers and metadata but it likely won’t get all of it. Overwriting media information may remove custom changes you’ve made, so there’s a trade off to be made and be sure to choose the option that will best meet your needs.

Next up, I’ll show you how to get album and song information manually and more.

Thanks for reading! Hope these posts help you work better and smarter with Windows Media Player 12.

William R. Stanek

williamstanek at aol dot com

https://www.twitter.com/WilliamStanek