Windows Media Player Library
I've been collecting music fairly
conscientiously for over 20 years. For the purposes of this discussion that
translates into around 2500 CDs. Having suffered a couple of burglaries and a
number of house moves, including Australia to US and back, I decided
to reduce the physical footprint of those CDs. Over a period of two years I
ripped all my albums to a mix of MP3 and WMA files. All 29000-odd tracks are on
a 160GB+ hard drive, and that hard drive is also
backed up to another similar drive kept in a cupboard across town. All the
silver-disks and sleeves were moved out of the multiple bookcases into ring
binders and shelved. Bingo - about 1/2 a room less footprint. Now if I could
just find a way to quickly scan my similarly comprehensive piano sheet music collection,
so I could eliminate another 1/2 room of shelf-space...
During the time I ripped all of those CDs I
got to know many of Windows Media Player's library... um... quirks REALLY well…
and the importance of a backup … especially after WMP 9 updated my
library from the internet database overnight after I first installed it and
re-arranged and/or deleted dozens of albums. Oh yes - the option that would
allow WMP to do this was "off". Yikes! I have since seen this
behaviour on several other WMP 9 and 10 installations, and have read other
reports of it on the microsoft.public.windowsmedia newsgroups. It will also
overwrite personally imported album art with art from mismatched albums.
Somehow this does not accord well with the Trustworthy
Computing goals laid out by Microsoft.
At the time of writing, the WMP team have
resisted adding any useful Library and tagging items to the WMP 10 FAQ
- even though these are indeed frequently asked questions. Embarrassment?
Perhaps: there have been quite a few revealing asides from team posts on the
public newsgroups that indicate even some of them don't find the library
particularly up to scratch. Given that WMP is supposed to be an integral part
of Windows, you can see that in the future much of this is likely to be
absorbed in the shell and WINFS file system. The current path with WMP doesn't
make me feel very cosy about the ability of the WMP team to manage this
transition. Idle thought: did the current EU case against Microsoft's inclusion
of WMP in Windows contribute to the announced delay in WinFS...?
Anyway, here is the first article on
Frequently Avoided Questions: how
Windows Media Player 10 deals with Artist data. Most of it applies to v9 as
well: http://msmvps.com/thinice/articles/15229.aspx