Windows Media Player 12 Adventure

[MrPhil 58]

Hey guys, I'm writing this to let you know of one of my pass-time these days. Ever since I bought my first Laptop (with Vista :S), I've been using WMP for listening to my music. Until very recently I used a very simple filing system for my songs: dump them all in the same folder with "Artist - Title of the song" header. Once, I used iTunes and it put freaking Mayhem in my folder, putting all the songs in Artist/Album folders. Which pissed the hell out of me, because well, the music is not always tagged correctly right? Plus I hate the tagging system from iTunes. II've been having all kind of troubles to file my music correctly, because eventually, I set out to tag my music correctly, that is ensure there is a Cover for every songs/albums, the right music style is identified correctly, the right album title is applied...

 

As you can see from this picture, sometimes, the songs are not tagged properly and you don't get the album art. I tried numerous ways to update this and here's what I found: you can drag and drop the correct picture of the album on the picture zone, but it might pop and be replaced by something wrong for numerous reasons. First of all, I came to realize the the filing system from iTune was the right one (main folder/Artist Folder/Album Folder), but in order to have my music filed correctly, I decided to do-it manually.

The best way to tag an album is to use WMP to tag "automatically" (actually, that's more of a semi-automatic way) the albums. Right click on the picture will enable you to use that feature. Here's what I found about this feature: online database are not complete and you often have to correct what's there anyway.

From my experience, however, you have to use that feature to ensure that you can properly tag the songs with correct pictures. Here's why: auto-tagging generates a serie of 4 hidden pictures that have an unique ID linked to the songs of the album you are currently tagging. Another thing I've noticed is that some of the albums on the online database lack images. For the method I'm using you cannot choose them, or else you will not have the 4 unique pictures you need to have the correct album art associated to the song. Also, you can't change a song's picture when playing that song.

 

Don't know if anyone of you is doing crazy filing stuff like that? Anyway I'll post more when I have some questions or observations. If you have questions yourself about the tagging system for WMP or anything you wanna say regarding this topic, you can say so here...

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Here's an issue I've been having: my music library uses WMP to be browsed. Sometimes, I get my music from friends, sometimes I extract my own CD's and sometimes, I buy songs off iTunes (I know, shitty that I have to use iTunes to buy music, but whatever...). IUnfortunately, iTunes don't let you choose if your music will have variable bit, nor the format. So quite often, I have these .mp4/.m4a songs. Unfortunately, sometimes, for some reason, the songs can't all be added to WMP's library. For example, I've bought the Can't Hide Country album from Hali Hicks. Out of the 12 songs, only 8 of them shown-up into WMP's library. If some of you have had that problem, here's the fix I've done: using Freemake Audio Converter, I converted the songs from MP4's to MP3's. Gotta warn you, when you install this kind of programs, be careful, as they often "recommend" that you install some other bullshit programs that aren't quite useful. So there's this. Once converted to MP3's, the tags will most likely be messed-up and need to be done again. But at least, you'll have access to these songs.

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Here's a case I've encountered many times: auto-tagging a CD sometimes yield only a choice of one CD, one that "has 0 songs". If the CD does have a cover image (even if not the right one), I'd select-it. You can always change the image to something else after. Then, you will have to put a number on each of the song, and name them. Do not forget that afterward, you have to add the "interperet artist" or something like that. I don't know what they are using in english for this field, but if you use the last.fm scrobbler, you'll need that field to be written. Also, you generally have to set the music style to something more fitting than the auto-tag choice.

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I've been using last.fm for some time now (here's my account, if anyone's curious: http://www.last.fm/user/Ph1lippe?setlang=en ). One thing I've noticed is that sometimes, in WMP, songs don't have their duration indicated (in case any of you is wondering, by the way, all that I have been speaking about from the beginning is from the library mode, in WMP, not regular mode). This is bad for 2 reasons: 1- You will not be able to read a part that's further in the song, leading you to restart the song every time. 2- You will not be able to scrobble-it with last.fm (unless you try to listen the song from another device, but that's not the point...) I've found that trying to move the song from a different folder while WMP is open can lead to corrupt an MP3 in this manner, so unless you want to expand some time fixing songs with a method I mentionned earlier, you had better move songs while WMP is closed.

Edited March 24, 2014 by MrPhil