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How to rebuild your Windows Media Player Library?
Every once in a while your media library might get corrupted. Reasons for this could be a power outage, BSOD or some other intermittent Windows problem. Please follow the steps below to get rid of a corrupted media library and reset it so it will rebuild.
Note: these steps are for Windows Media Player 12 (Windows 7)
Step 1: Stop Windows Media Player and its services
First you need to stop all programs that can have access to the library. Please follow these steps to do so:
- Click the start menu and type “services.msc” in the textbox. A program called services.msc will show, which you will need to click
- In the services management console find the service “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service” and select it.
- At the left part of the screen, you can click “Stop” to stop the service (alternatively you can right-click the service and choose “Stop” from the services’ context menu
- Now open up the task manager clicking the Start button again and now you need to type “taskmgr.exe” and select it from the list. Alternatively you can right-click on any empty part of the taskbar and choose “Start Task Manager” from the taskbar’s context menu.
- The task manager shows and you will need to find any reference to Windows Media Player. In this case click the “Processes” tab and scroll down to find any item named “wmplayer.exe” (with or without “*32” behind its name). Select that item and click “End Process” and wait until the process has ended. You can now close the task manager.
- You have now successfully stopped all Windows Media Player related processes. Time to proceed.
Step 2: Deleting the library
- Click Start again and now type (or copy and paste) this folder name:
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player
You should see the term “Media Player” in the start menu like below and you need to click it.
- The Windows Explorer window will show something like this:
- Delete the file “CurrentDatabase_372.wmdb”. NOTE: the number 372 may be different on your system; delete any file starting with “CurrentDatabase” and ending with “.wmdb”
- Delete all files that start with “LocalMLS_” and end with “.wmdb”
- Close the Windows Explorer window
Step 3: re-enable the Windows Media Player network service
If you have closed the services management window please follow the steps mentioned in “Step 1” but now choose “Start” service instead of Stop.
Step 4: Let Windows Media Player rebuild the database
Now you can simply open up Windows Media Player and wait for WMP to rebuild the library. This may take some time (my machine takes about 2 hours to fully build the library with over 30,000 items).
Step 5: Reboot your machine (optional)
If your media library gets corrupted after BSODs or power outages or some other software error, you may find that rebooting manually will save the media library in a good state. If your machine would reset itself after you have just build the library, you may notice that it is corrupt again or still empty. Rebooting manually will solve that, because it will gracefully close the connections to the media library.
Finished
Any other issues you still have? Please let me know! Good luck with your library!
[...] From: http://www.avsoft.nl/index.php/maintenance/how-to-rebuild-your-windows-media-player-library.htm [...]
I have rebuilt my WMP 12 library per above. And it still fails to get tag data for 40 to 60% of my albums. For example, I have (4) GRP Christmas albums but only 1 has album info. I have allowed 14 hours for the rebuild. The only reason I use WMP is because it is the only player my Yamaha RX-2065 receiver will recognize. Oh well, any advice is certainly appreciated. Thanks for all the work you do.