Bad WMP day
Two CDs arrived in the mail today. First task was to rip them to WMA Lossless.
CD#1, Alex Kharlamov's
Posa Somata, Posa Pneumata was recognized correctly, but the Album Artist details were right-padded with a few dozen blank spaces. Almost two years after a Windowsmedia PM wrote me to say this issue was finally under control, it obviously isn't. Extra whitespace in Artist and Album details is one of those non-obvious gotchas that create multiple apparently identical nodes in the Media Player library. BTW if you see multiple "Unknown" nodes, then it's usually because there is (1) the system "Unknown" (which if I had my druthers would be flagged a little differently) corresponding to a blank field entry; (2) the likely presence of a field with the text "Unknown" typed into and possibly (3) a field with "Unknown " with some spaces padding out the right of the field. The bext cure is to delete the text from cases (2) and (3), and then all the "Unknowns" are filed together.
CD#2,
Simply Gifts was also recognized correctly, but the Album Art is for a totally different album that doesn't correspond for Artist, Title, track details, country etc. There's really no way of notifying the database minders (ha!) in the way that you would say notify Amazon of an error in a listing. Microsoft appears to be beyond correction in this sphere. I scanned the CD cover and created my own jpeg album art. I attempted to add this file to the WMA files I'd ripped, but for some reason the Advanced Tag Editor is having one of its "I'm not going to play, and I'm not even going to give you an error" days, where it simply fails silently when attempting to add an image file to any or all of the WMAs. I replaced all of the folder's Album Art files with the correct image, but WMP does not like that, and has chosen to show the "quaver" placeholder art instead. It doesn't like being corrected. Luckily I have Jet Audio installed, and I can edit WMA tags (including adding album art) via an Explorer contact menu. Sadly I can't bulk edit the tracks as WMP's Advanced Tag Editor would normally allow, but it works! Sadly though, the correct album art still doesn't show up in either WMP's Now Playing pane or the Advanced Tag Editor.