Media player moving music library?

[conundrum]

Hi all, I did a few searches on this but couldn't find anything that matched these symptoms. Someone I know has a problem in windows media player on windows 10, where the tracks in the library view have apparently been re-organised in a seemingly random way. For example, going into a particular artist will not show tracks by that artist, but a number of different artists. It wasn't too long ago that the same person had a large portion of their music dissapear suddenly from the hard drive, so I'm not sure if there's any connection between those incidents.

The only suggestion I've found on a google search is to delete the library file and let it find the music again, but I'm hesitant to recommend that as they're not particularly experienced with computers, and it seems like treating the symptoms rather than the problem. Has anyone encountered this issue before?

 

[holdum333]

HYi Try the W10 trouble shooter!

 

[holdum333]

Have a look here! The above is for W10!
Open the Windows Media Player Settings troubleshooter

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

You might also try to do a SYSTEM RESTORE prior to the point where your friend began to lose their music and scrambling of music files/folders. Remember that Microsoft "pushes" down weekly updates on Tuesday to all W10 computers, and that about once a month an update can scramble your computer if it's an especially large update. This is a common occurrence with all of the library folders; documents, music, photos, and videos.

Good luck,
<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>

 

[Neemobeer]

Windows Media Player does use a database to maintain the discovered music. Are the files themselves missing or are just missing from within media player. If the latter you can either delete the database or another trick is to just make a new folder in the library and it should trigger the database to update.

 

[conundrum]

Thanks for the advice everyone, I've taken a look at the computer and used the troubleshooter to rebuild the database. It doesn't seem like there's a problem with WMP, but the music itself. For example, there's an album that's supposed to be full of music sung by a particular singer. The album is there and matches that album's folder on the hard drive, which contains the right songs (almost, there's 1 missing), with the right tags, but they're sung by different people.

 

[Neemobeer]

WMP reads the embedded meta data on the music files when it classifies and sorts your music, so if this is incorrect then it will show up incorrectly in WMP.