# Solved: Media player shows everything as "unknown"



## gurutech (Apr 23, 2004)

Win7, latest version of Media Player. I have a ton of music that all of a sudden is shown in Media Player as "Unknown Artist", "Unknown Album". The track names are still OK, and the actual MP3 files are still in the original locations (\\Music\Artist\Album\## TrackName) (where ## = track number).

iTunes shows everything properly, but Media Player is wrong. I've tried a tag editor but even with the correct settings, it doesn't want to re-tag the files - it wants to rename them. The tags within the files are correct.

Wondering if there's a "cache" of some sort, or another way to force Media Player to re-scan my entire library, and update the tags based on the directory structure. Any ideas?


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## stantley (May 22, 2005)

The basic problem here is that iTunes use ID3v2.4 tags, Windows (and WMP) uses ID3v2.3 tags and can't read ID3v2.4. So if you update the tags with iTunes and then add those tracks to WMP they're going to show up as "Unknown Artist". This is always going to cause problems if you try to use both iTunes and WMP libraries at the same time.

So pick which one you like better to use as your primary library and use the other one as a player only. You can use Mp3tag to take a look at the tags, see which versions are on the files and convert ones that are incorrect.

If you use iTunes as your primary library then I would delete the WMP database. But before you do you should turn off monitor folders so that WMP doesn't automatically add music files to it's library. Here's how to delete the database, ignore the last step:

http://www.groovypost.com/howto/mic...rebuild-your-windows-media-player-12-library/


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## gurutech (Apr 23, 2004)

That was it... except I just used iTunes to "convert" the ID3 tags to v2.3 instead - I really don't use either application to play mp3's, I use another application, but I use WMP to burn the CD's to MP3, and iTunes to sync with my phone, but on my PC, I don't use either of those apps to play music.


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