Repairing music library?

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I have quite an extensive music library with over 600 albums plus a large number of individual tunes, all digitised and loaded into my Music Library. In general, I have always used either Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center to do everything with my music. I had some problems with some of the albums having the incorrect data with them so I installed a program called “TuneUp” by TuneUp Media Inc ( http://www.tuneupmedia.com/ ) which promised to organize and fix up my library. The program was less than promised and managed to trash many of the Album Art files and also placed most individual tunes into a single gigantic ‘album’ labeled ‘Unknown’ with unknown artists and unknown titles. In other words, it screwed things up badly.

Is there a utility, or “Media Player” that has a built in utility, that will scan all my library and fix things or am I faced with the very daunting task of manually correcting information or re-ripping all albums?

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Does this mean you don’t have any sort of backup you can restore from? If so, I suggest you get one done before making any further changes. Unfortunately I can’t help you on the fixing side of things, other than re-ripping all the albums. Let’s hope that others have a solution or two.

Eliminate spare time: start programming PowerShell

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If your music is saved as MP3 files they may have metadata that indicates where the music is from. If so, MediaMonkey (free) will collect that information and list the songs in some sort of order it won’t change anything. To view the metadata of the files select one in Windows Explorer.

cheers, Paul

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The program was less than promised and managed to trash many of the Album Art files and also placed most individual tunes into a single gigantic ‘album’ labeled ‘Unknown’ with unknown artists and unknown titles.

Does that mean you let it analyse all your music in one fell swoop, then clicked ‘save all’? If so, then unless ‘undo’ is still available, you may be out of luck. I have never used it, only read the on-line help, but it does suggest you let it analyse just a few tracks (or albums or artists) first.

If, on the other hand, you never let it ‘save’ anything, it may have done nothing yet. Have you run media player and confirmed that track info, album art etc is really damaged? If so (and you may need to get MP to refresh before it shows the current state), then it is back to the drawing board. The irony is that, given your current position, TuneUp should be the solution to the problem. If your files’ tags are badly corrupted, you have nothing to lose by trying TuneUp again.

Good luck (and create a backup once it is all sorted).

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Assuming the actual music files are still there and their metadata is intact, the following will recreate the library in Windows Media Player:

1. Open “Services” from the Start Menu / Control Panel, and stop the “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service”.

2. Now navigate to “%Userprofile%AppDataLocalMicrosoftMedia Player”.

3. Delete all the “Windows Media Library (.wmdb)” types of file inside that folder.

4. Done! Now simply open WMP and it should start indexing your library again. This might take a while with 600 albums!

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I got very frustrated with WMP when it wouldn’t rip a second CD of a set (it put it on top of the first). I got Media Monkey(free) and it works better although it has a tendency to misclassify in genre (I have a lot of classical music and it does not always get it right). It did fix some things that WMP had gotten wrong without re-ripping anything so before you try anything I would give that a try.

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I agree with the suggestions to use MediaMonkey. It has been my preferred music manager for the last eight years and helps me handle a library about four times larger. I have recreated my library a few times after major mishaps and it has always been very reliable. I use Media Monkey Gold, which is only $25.

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