Songs do not appear in the Windows Media Player library

Anonymous

WIndows Media Player 12 not adding songs

I got my new PC with Windows 7 this afternoon, and copied over 10,000 songs into My Music folder. None of these songs will show up in Windows Media Player 12 song library. My Music folder is one of the default save location in WMP Libraries. Only 3 songs are showing up in the Library, and these are the three on the Public Music folder. Yet when I add a song to the Public Music folder, it gets added to the Library. Then when I close WMP and re-open it, we're back to the original 3 songs! I spent an hour with HP support this evening and did not get any where. I have tried system restore. I have tried restoring media library. I think my WMP may be corrupt. Any thoughts on what I'm missing here?

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Anonymous

I read this on another topic, try it.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Hi,

This problem occurs because the Windows Media Player library database has become corrupted.

To resolve this problem, clear the Windows Media Player database. To do this, follow these steps:

Exit Windows Media Player.
Click Start, click Run, type %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Media Player, and then click OK.
Select all the files in the folder, and then click Delete on the File menu.

Note You do not have to delete the folders that are in this folder.

4. Restart Windows Media Player.

Note Windows Media Player automatically rebuilds the database.

If this does not resolve the problem, clear the Windows Media Player database cache files. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Exit Windows Media Player.

2. Click Start, click Run, type %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft, and then click OK.

3. Select the Media Player folder, and then click Delete on the File menu.

4. Restart Windows Media Player.

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Anonymous

I had same symptoms as cturner003 in a 64 bit Win 7 environment. But the problem was entirely different from everythin I read up to Nov 2010. As I started looking into the file properties under the details tab, I noticed that all of these files had file attributes 'R' and 'S' set. Turns out that somehow all of my music got marked as 'Read Only' \ 'System' files when I restored them. My fault I'm sure. Tried all of the solutions up to the Nov 2010 entries to no avail. Finally discovered the issue. Once I changed the file attributes, all of the music started showing up in WMP. Should have picked that up sooner.

For these files, I couldn't find any way to change the attributes except through the command prompt.

1. Click Start, Click All Programs, ClickAccessories. Thenright clickCommand Prompt and select 'Run as administrator'.

2. Type Attrib /? to get familiar with the attributes command.

3. My music is stored in the path c:\users\glym\music. So I fixed the problem with the following command string:attrib -r -s c:\users\glym\music\*.* /s /d

Once the file attributes are cleaned up, make sure Media Player is closed. ClickStart , ClickRun, Copy and paste in: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft, ClickOK

Delete the 'Media Player' folder completely. That gets rid of the database and the cached entries.

6. Restart Media Player . . . Bingo!

Thanks Microsoft for several useful Knowldege Base articles that I plagiarized here.

I was having an issue like this. No new tv shows I was recording and adding to my videos folder would show on one pc, but showed fine on two others, all win 7 64bit home prem.

steps 4 5 and 6 worked like a charm for me. I didnt do anything but steps 4,5 and 6 Thank you.

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137 additional answers

Anonymous

2013-07-18T17:40:06+00:00

It's so stupid that you cannot manually add a song or group of songs. UX 101 says that users like control and unexpected results (bugs) should be easy to recover from. Microsoft please add a feature that allows you clear the index manually and an option to immediately add a file inside of WMP. This is necessary for a good user experience.

Beauty and hiding controls looks good but at what cost? If only the most expert users can accomplish normal tasks like adding a song to the library, I'd say that's a major fail. I add and delete song files (checked out from the library) all the time and I'm not going to do that from WMP. If you can't handle outside interaction smoothly, you should give up on that feature and give the control back to the user. They know what they want in there much better then the computer/MS does.

Also the menu structure sucks! If I didn't know pressing <alt> opens up the menu, I'd not be able to do half the stuff i want. Why would you even consider automatically hiding the menu bar without having some other way of getting to it? Take a hint from Chrome. They added the three lines which gives majority of the options people use.
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Anonymous

2013-07-10T19:41:59+00:00

My windows Media Player is also acting odd. Dont know if Ive accidently clicked a setting I shouldnt have but...

I open my media player and click on a song it only plays that song then stops.

I can play a full album by clicking on the album, that will then play full album straight through or on shuffle..

When I used to click on one song the playlist area would fill up with all my songs from the media player, now only the song I clicked on is in the playlist.

Same with full albums that click on album only that album shows in the play list.

I can however once song or album is selected and showing in playlist area I can add more to playlist and save the playlists. They play fine straight through or on shuffle.

If I just want to play media player on shuffle after clicking on just one song then as soon as the song is over it stops playing because there are no more songs in the playlist area.

How do I get all my songs back in the playlist area?

I have gone down the Control panel> trouble shoting route to find a problem and the "Make media files show up in media player libary" solution. When applyed it seems to be working at first but once fully updated/restructured its back to as before.
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Anonymous

2013-07-10T14:54:35+00:00

yea i'm missing a few random tracks aswell. they play fine if i open them from explorer where they're actually saved. they just don't show up in the media player library! what's going on microsoft?!

I've got some albums not showing up in media player as well. My music library is stored on a Windows Home Server, the path to my music is \my-whs\Music

Media player did an ok job of indexing stuff and getting album art but there are a handful of albums that just won't show art (shows a black box instead).

In some cases, I was able to remove the album from my Library and re-add it and that fixed the problem. In other cases, the album doesn't show up in Media player after being re-added. When I try to add it again, it says that the album is already in the Library.

Another thing, when I remove an album from the Library (in an attempt to fix the art) and then re-add it, I get the following message

"Windows added the location to your Library but couldn't share the location" Then under More Info it says: "Windows can't change this folder's share settings because it's on another computer". Do I need to go an chage the permission on the Music folder on my WHS?

PC is Windows 7.
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