Windows Media Player Library Export

Support
1

Dear all

Firstly, thank you Florian for developing this app and allowing us to use it for free. I will certainly donate once i've worked out how to use the app!

May I also apologise in advance if this question has been covered before, but after searching for over 1/2 hour, I was unable to find an answer.

I've spent about five years painstakingly compiling my music library, consising of WMA and MP3 files. For each track, I have stated the genre, composer (which for jazz tracks is particularly time-consuming given sometimes there are multiple composers!) and added a tag identifying the source i.e. CD/download.

I have used Windows Media Player ("WMP") for the editing process over these years, and everything appears correct on WMP. But I note that for about 300 of the 12,000 tracks, while all the relevant information displays in WMP for these tracks, when viewing them on File Explorer, those details are missing. For an even greater number, the album cover is missing.

I need to now migrate my music files to a new computer.

I know that as soon as I move my music files to my new computer, these files are going to become an issue, as the metadata will be missing.

Is there a simple, automated way of getting all the metadata currently displaying for each track on WMP to copy over to the file itself, so that it shows in File Explorer? If I had to edit each file separately, this would take a very long time.

May I add, that if you have any other suggestions as to what might be a better way to proceed, I would be very glad to hear it!

Many thanks

Timmy

2

The file explorer is no tagging tool and not reliable in respect to showing the tags.
In WMP there is a setting in File>Options>Media library to write the information from WMP to the files. See if that does what you need.
To check files for the existence or absence a data, use MP3tag and not the file explorer or WMP.
You can either sort the respecitve field or filter for more or less complicated criteria.
In respect to covers: these could reside as file folder.jpg in the album's folder and can be embedded in the files, using MP3tag.

3

Dear ohrenkino

Many thanks for your reply.

You're right. There is a way of correcting the filenames through WMP, and for the benefit of others I'm posting a link to the website which shows you how.

The most important thing is that you go to File > Options > Privacy, and then uncheck the box for 'update music files by retrieving...', and then Tools > apply media information changes. Without this, it didn't work for me.

I should say that even after this there were some files which were not updated in file explorer, as shown in mp3tag (great tool btw). So I just manually amended them throuhg mp3tag, as by this point, they were much fewer in number.

I now need to work out how to do exactly the same thing in iTunes!

Thanks for the headsupp re the album covers.

KR

Timmy

4

Are we talking about filenames or embedded metadata in tags?

In the old days, changing the tag format wrote the data from the database to the files.
It was enough to only use the function, even without any real change to the format. So if you change the tag format from V2.3 to V2.3 you do not loose anything.

5

Yes, sorry I meant to say the embedded metadata in the tags.

Thanks for your insight once again.