Windows Media Player secrets

Published January 4, 2005 by Ed Bott

Mike Williams explains the mysteries of Windows Media Player Artist fields:

WMP gives you three primary fields to work with for musical artists: Album Artist, Contributing Artist, and Composer. While functionally different, successive versions of WMP have hopelessly complicated how these are presented to the user. In v10, the Library has a tree associated with each, whereas v9 only exposed a [Contributing] Artist tree.

I had figured out some of this stuff during the writing of Windows XP Inside Out, Second Edition (when WMP10 was still in beta), but this post taught me several really interesting things I didn’t know. If you use WMP and you have a large media library, this is a must-read.

I discovered Mike’s blog thanks to Matt’s wiki. Isn’t the Web a wonderful thing?