Windows Media Player 12 library messed up


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When I first install Win 7 I did it in a different hard drive separated from my Vista installation. At first, when I setup the WMP 12 library, I added the folder under which my music was in the Vista installation. Since 7 seems stable enough to use every day (although I will leave my Vista installation untouched), and even though the GUI in Windows Media Player 12 is disgustingly ugly, I thought I'd copy all the music from the Vista drive to the 7 drive. After doing that there were some songs in the library that couldn't be found, so I went to Organize, Manage Libraries, Music and deleted the location in the Vista drive, leaving only the "My Music" from my user's main folder, and the "Public music". After that, I found under Tools, Advanced, the item "Restore Media Library". That prompted me with a dialog saying "Continuing will empty your media library and close the Windows Media Player. Do you wish to continue?".

Since I'm a daredevil, I clicked yes. When I opened the Media Player again, the library was empty. My files are physically still there, and they show in Windows Explorer both under the "My Music" folder and under the music library. But in WMP 12, even though it's been open for quite several minutes, it only shows "There are no items in this library yet - the Player is searching for digital media files in the background."

Any ideas and solutions?

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It should show at the bottom that it is searching. If you have a lot of media it will probably take a while. Just curious, why didn't you add your music folders to the music library in Windows 7 instead of moving all of the music from the Vista drive to the Windows 7 drive?

Anyone have more details on the "Restore Media Library" feature?

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It should show at the bottom that it is searching. If you have a lot of media it will probably take a while. Just curious, why didn't you add your music folders to the music library in Windows 7 instead of moving all of the music from the Vista drive to the Windows 7 drive?

Anyone have more details on the "Restore Media Library" feature?

It's not showing anything, plus it's been open for an hour and still nothing. I even moved a few folders back to the original location and added the Vista drive music folder to the WMP 12 library, but still nothing. I think the "Restore Media Library" command was the kiss of death, so to speak. It's probably easy to fix if somebody figures it out. In the meantime, I guess I'm stuck with iTunes. At least the interface is not so hideous as WMP 12. If only it could sync to my iRiver player :(

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I think i had a similar problem.

I installed 7 on a separate partition to Vista and pointed it's media player at my music folder, it seems to have taken over as when i'm in Vista, media player is empty and to even look in my music folder i have to take ownership of it

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Check folder permissions. I had this problem when I moved from Vista to Win7. Some of my folders still had old users (GUIDs mostly) listed as owners etc.

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Here's the solution, somebody pointed me to it in a different thread. In Control Panel, open Troubleshooting, then Programs, then click on Windows Media Player settings and follow the prompts. Fixed it right away for me.

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