I have been an adamant user of Windows Media Center for a couple
of years now. It started completely unintentionally, I purchased a
Dell XPS 400 system that had Windows XP Media Center Edition
preinstalled. Once I dug into the features, I was instantly hooked.
When you combine Media Center with a TV tuner card and Media Center
Extender devices like the XBox 360 you have a complete solution for
distributing DVR, music, photos, and movies to any television in
your home.
Currently I am using Windows 7 as my hub machine, and I have two
Media Center Extenders: an XBox 360 in one room and a Linksys
DMA2200 in the other. For the most part, this setup works
flawlessly.
Lately, however I have been noticing some issues with the Music
Library on both of the Media Center Extenders. A large number of
newly added music tracks appear under the artist name "Unknown
Artist", even though the tracks are all tagged properly and show up
correctly in both Songbird (my
media player of choice) and on the Media Center interface of
the main computer.
At this point I should also mention that my main source of
purchasing music lately has been the Amazon MP3
store. It's comparable to iTunes in the selection and pricing,
but the main advantage are the DRM-free tracks.
Initially, I thought maybe a corrupt music library was the
problem, so I tried to wipe out and completely rebuild the
libraries for both extenders. Unfortunately, this did nothing to
solve the problem.
I started looking through different posts online and also
looking at some of the tracks that were having issues on my
computer. One thing that stood out was that the track detail was
not showing up in Windows Explorer (the first copy of track 5 on
the list):
I tried to edit the track detail from explorer and received the
message "Error 0x8007000D: The data is invalid.":
As it turns out, Windows 7 (and Vista) do not support ID3 v2.4
standard, they support ID3 v2.3. So the cause of my problem was two
sources: First, on some occasions when I was making metadata
changes in Songbird, the ID3 tag was being updated to the 2.4
version. Second, it appears that the Amazon mp3 store also uses ID3
v2.4 tag, so everything that I purchased was not being added
correctly.
Fortunately, identifying the problem was much more difficult
than fixing it. The easiest solution is a
piece of software called MP3Tag. This is a free download, but
if it solves your problems like it has solved mine then you should
consider making a
donation to the developers to thank them for their work.
Once you have MP3Tag installed, open the program. From the
Tools menu, select Options. On
the left side of the Options page, select Mpeg under the tags
section and verify that ID3v2 is checked, and that
the radio button labeled ID3v2.3 UTF-16 is the
selected option:
Click OK to save your changes.
Now, select Change Directory from the
File menu in MP3Tag. Navigate to any folder on
your computer that contains problematic tracks. Make any tag
changes you need by using the fields on the left, and then click
Save on the toolbar to update the tag information. You can make
changes to an entire set of files by highlighting them all an
entering in the shared information. After you have saved your
changes, the tracks should now appear correctly in Windows Explorer
and in your Media Center extenders.
Overall, I spent about an hour re-tagging invalid tracks, but
now that I know the cause it should be relatively easy to check new
music as I purchase it. I hope this helps others as well!
