I have been using Windows Vista Media Centre as a Home Theatre PC for several years. In that time the Music Library has been polished, album art and track information cleaned up so all albums have the correct information associated with them and nothing shows up as unknown in the artist view. I can tolerate some things, such as podcasts, without album names.
With Windows 7 this was not the case. After adding the music folders to the Music library there were 74 tracks listed as unknown. This brings us to the first recommendation - if you can you should create a readonly network share for your music so that Windows Media Player cannot change anything. If Windows Media Player does not like your tags it can end up removing them - I ended up with over a thousand tracks with the carefully crafted album information removed. Luckily I had a backup (and had not overwritten it). This was probably caused by the lookup of album information that Windows Media Player does. I have turned off everything I can find in the options that may try and touch the media information and this makes the import into the music library quicker. I have now made a readonly version of the music files for Windows 7 to access.
Once you have a safe place for your music files you can fix the problem files. In Windows 7 media player you can find the problem files by scrolling to the bottom of the artists view and double clicking on the unknown artists entry. If there is no unknown artists entry then you can try the genre or album views. If you have no bad entries then you have nothing to do. To fix the bad entries I use mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html) but you can use whatever application you are used to. Some bad entries required the tags to be removed and recreated, some were corrupted files which required re-ripping and some were unsupported file types (ipod audiobook m4b) which needed converting. I still have some without genre tags and some (podcasts) without album information but I am now happy with the health of my music library. I have two backups on external (USB) 1TB hard disks - one current and one that I know was good when it was made. This is to protect me from overwriting a good backup.
With Windows 7 this was not the case. After adding the music folders to the Music library there were 74 tracks listed as unknown. This brings us to the first recommendation - if you can you should create a readonly network share for your music so that Windows Media Player cannot change anything. If Windows Media Player does not like your tags it can end up removing them - I ended up with over a thousand tracks with the carefully crafted album information removed. Luckily I had a backup (and had not overwritten it). This was probably caused by the lookup of album information that Windows Media Player does. I have turned off everything I can find in the options that may try and touch the media information and this makes the import into the music library quicker. I have now made a readonly version of the music files for Windows 7 to access.
Once you have a safe place for your music files you can fix the problem files. In Windows 7 media player you can find the problem files by scrolling to the bottom of the artists view and double clicking on the unknown artists entry. If there is no unknown artists entry then you can try the genre or album views. If you have no bad entries then you have nothing to do. To fix the bad entries I use mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html) but you can use whatever application you are used to. Some bad entries required the tags to be removed and recreated, some were corrupted files which required re-ripping and some were unsupported file types (ipod audiobook m4b) which needed converting. I still have some without genre tags and some (podcasts) without album information but I am now happy with the health of my music library. I have two backups on external (USB) 1TB hard disks - one current and one that I know was good when it was made. This is to protect me from overwriting a good backup.
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