Rename that tune in Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player makes it easy to create a large music library on your computer. But if you don’t pay attention to the way the music is labeled, the songs on your computer will seem like the digital equivalent of unmarked CDs in a shoe box. Maintaining correct and complete information for each album and song in your collection will allow you to find your music fast.

The media attributes for albums and songs in the Player Library—which include album art, album artist, song title, rating (the number of stars you or a data provider assign to a song), contributing (song) artist, composer, and release year—are collectively known as media information or metadata. When the media information in the Player is correct, you can find a song by typing part of an artist’s name or a few words from the song title in the search box.

Most of the time, the Player automatically finds all of the media information for you when you rip a CD or drop a music file into your Music folder, but this process isn’t foolproof. When information is incorrect or missing, it can frustrate your listening experience. It might be difficult to find what you want if your polka albums are accidentally labeled as punk, or London Calling appears as Clash album #3.

After wrestling with incorrect media information in my own music collection, I’ve adopted a few strategies for keeping the Player Library tidy. I try to find the easiest solutions before I start making manual fixes. Whenever possible, I let the wizard do the work.

The first thing I do when faced with missing media information is…nothing. Album and song info usually appear immediately in the Player Library when you rip a CD, but art can sometimes take longer to appear.

If a day goes by and you still don’t find the album art or information you’re looking for in the Player Library, use the Find Album Information wizard. To launch the wizard, right-click the album art (which is still, most likely, the "musical note" placeholder art), and then click Find album info.

Your specific experience with the wizard depends on how much information you already have in the Player Library. When only a few media attributes are missing, the wizard can typically fill in the rest for you. For example, if you have correct album and song information but no album art, the wizard can usually find an exact match. Review the information that the wizard finds. If it’s what you want, click Finish. The wizard automatically updates any inconsistent media information and adds the correct art.

If some of the song information in the Player Library is different from the information the wizard finds online, the wizard allows you to pair each unmatched track with the correct track. The existing tracks in the Player Library appear on the left side of the wizard. The wizard’s suggestions for matching tracks appear on the right side. Scroll through the suggested tracks and click the one you want, or click Edit to add your own information. Once you’ve matched all of the unmatched tracks, click Next to see the updated information for each song, and then click Finish to save these changes.

Occasionally, no media information appears after you rip a CD, leaving you with an untitled album and untitled songs. You can still use the wizard, but you’ll need to enter the album artist or album name in the Search box, and then click the Search button. The wizard generates a list of possible album matches for you. Select the album that’s a match, make any necessary track changes, and then click Finish.

The wizard is usually the fastest option, but sometimes it’s just as easy to make the change yourself directly in the Player Library. If you’re happy with most of the basic media information, you can tweak individual media attributes by right-clicking one of the attributes, and then clicking Edit. To speed the process, you can make edits to several attributes at once: Hold down the Shift key while you select multiple instances of the same attribute, and then right-click the entire selection. When you edit the text for one media attribute, the Player changes the information for all of the selected attributes.

Another quick fix involves a common problem in the Player Library where songs from one album have inconsistent attributes. This creates two partial versions of the same album. The solution is to drag the partial album with incorrect information onto the album with the correct information. The tracks combine into a single album. It’s always a good idea to run the album through the wizard after this fix to make sure the updated information is consistent with what the wizard finds.

If, for some reason, album art is still missing after the Player updates the album information and after you verify the song information with the wizard, you still have an easy option for dropping art onto the placeholder art. If you can find the correct art file on the Internet (such as on a website run by the record label that released the album), right-click the art file, and then click Copy. Then, in the Player Library, right-click the placeholder art you want to update, and click Paste album art.

If you aren’t familiar with the methods I’ve outlined, try them all to see which ones make the most sense for you. If you need more information about how to keep an orderly music collection, Media information in Windows Media Player: frequently asked questions is a good place to start.

It usually takes only a few seconds to fix media information in Windows Media Player once you’re familiar with the process. If you make the extra effort to maintain correct track information, you’ll thank yourself later when you’re looking for a single Norwegian black metal song amid the thousands of tracks in your impressive bluegrass, trance, and funk collection.