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More Annoyances With the Windows Media Player Library

Per my previous post on “More User’s Mad About Windows Media Player Library,” I decided that as I’ve been unable to process media information with Windows Media Player that the best thing to do is to just start over — and here’s another area where Windows Media Player sucks.

1. There is no add/remove program for Windows Media Player 10 to just kill it and reinstall and start over. The only way to get rid of it is to do a complete system restore back to the eons ago when I installed it — something that I’m not willing to do as I’ve installed lots of other things since.

2. There seems to be no easy way to just delete the library file. I found this out there which supposedly shows you how to delete your library to start over. The problem is that when doing a search on my c:/ drive for “media library” I come up with nothing. I can’t find the file to delete.

3. To manually delete all of your music takes days and days. To make matters worse I selected some music and started deleting last night and the computer froze up and only about 2,000 tracks were actually deleted this morning.

This is really unacceptable and a much easier method should exist for me to either delete or repair my library and move on. The really negative thing is that as WMP’s library is ultimately the library for MCE everything is impacted by this weak link.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Update: Thanks to Ed Bott, I’ve found the library! Thank’s Ed.

8 Replies to “More Annoyances With the Windows Media Player Library”

  1. Take a look at C:\Documents and Settings\[YOURNAMEHERE]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player – you’ll find “CurrentDatabase*.wmdb” files in there. You can try to delete those and see if the stuff is gone (have not tried this yet).
    Found it out via FileMon from http://www.sysinternals.com (which should really be installed on every system :).

    Hope this helps
    – Tobias

  2. Thanks for the suggestion Tobias. Unfortunately, that file is not where it should be. Further I did a search for folders and files on my PC looking for both “current” and “.wmdb” and Windows Explorer could not come up with the file.

    Thanks for the advice though. I’m still stuck with my library unfortunately.

  3. Thomas,

    I documented all this in Windows XP Inside Out Second Edition last year. My bet is that the files are exactly where they should be, only hidden. Try copying this text, exactly as typed (with percent signs) and paste it into the Run box:

    %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player

    Ed

  6. to uninstall media player you go to add/remove programs and put a check mark in the “Show Updates” box and then it will list the player in there

  8. Ed Bott’s solution worked perfectly. Delete all the database files you find in there, and you’re done!

    Thanks.

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