Help with windows media player!

[Pink Booties]

My sad story.

I love the Grateful Dead, and have an extensive collection of their concert recordings both audience-bootlegged and soundboard sources. I have tended each show with care, and made extensive notations on most tracks; whether it was a first performance, or a rare one, or a cover song, or who the special guest was, ... a whole lot of stuff.

I made all these notations in a columns feature called 'label' .

My trouble happened when I upgraded from WMP 9 to WMP 11 two weeks ago. When I did, much information was transferred to the new (overwritten?) program, MUCH was not, and the 'label' feature was gone, along with all the information I'd worked hard to collect. The upgrade kinda sucks.

Anyways, I'm flummoxed, and need ideas as to how on earth I can get all that info back. Help an old hippie, anyone?

[Pink Booties]

barumpa-bump, its worth it to me to keep asking.

[madurobob]

When you open a file in winamp and hit ALT + 3 (hold all three keys down at same time) do you not see the missing info - its not part of the ID3 tag?

Whups -sorry, you did say WMP, not winamp.. nevermind...

[Pantaz]

You should (no guarantees) be able to reinstall WMP 9. Try that and see if the data is still present. You might want/need to install it in a new, unique folder to prevent any conflict with WMP 11.

ETA: Old versions of Windows Media Player available here -- http://www.oldversion.com/Windows-Media-Player.html

[madurobob]

You should (no guarantees) be able to reinstall WMP 9. Try that and see if the data is still present. You might want/need to install it in a new, unique folder to prevent any conflict with WMP 11.

THAT is a good point. The media library is where the label column is, and that is controlled by the data folder. If your library was large its possible the folder was corrupted as the new version recompiled the media library.

You might be able to undo the damage by reverting back to WMP9. If that works, make a copy of that folder somewhere safe before you try to "upgrade" again.

That folder should be here:
"%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player\

and the library itself is a file name beginning with CurrentDatabase_.

Microsoft has something to say about it (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925718), too

[Pink Booties]

SUCCESS! Thanks for the help, folks. Turns out, I tried to download the old version, but my computer said , no, you already have the newest thing... so I figured to uninstall the new to make room for the old, and the program has a "rollback" feature to the old version.

All the old info is back! Sweeeeet.