Windows Media Player, as made by twats

This is staggering. It really is. Last night I burned CDs in order to transfer music from itunes into mp3 format- so I can actually use wmp rather than have 500 different players open at once. I then changed the names of all the songs so that I knew which track related to which song. Windows, in all it’s utter fuckwittery, has CHANGED THEM ALL BACK to ‘track 1’, ‘track 2’ etc. I even have ‘recent links’ on my wmp that point to the properly-named tracks. They no longer work.

How the hell did this happen?

So you renamed the files in Explorer? Or within WMP?

In Explorer, same as renaming any other file.

And you ripped the tracks as WAVs, or MP3s?

Whenever you burn a CD that is made of of MP3 tracks, it will not be on whatever Database WMP, iTunes, Realplayer and all those craps use for their Cd track listings because it’s custom made. It’s not really microsoft’s fault. Cds have been around the 80’s, and creating custom Cds was not even thought possible back then as computers could not even handle the audio from one. They had no way of actually storing the track names in the Cd tracks themselves, and to attempt to do so would make it incompatible with standard Cd players. So, it’s just a technical impossibility unless you’re copying a whole album, as the album will have the basic identifiers that the internet databases can pull for you.

MP3s, and losing the track names in the conversion I perfectly understand- it’s how and why explorer overrode my renaming that I’m PO’ed about.

I am confused as to what happened.

I’ll explain what I understand happened, to make sure I got it right:

  1. Neb bought songs on iTunes
  2. Burned those songs to an audio CD
  3. Ripped the songs from the CD into MP3s
  4. Renamed (and probably tagged) the MP3s
  5. Bork bork bork
  6. Poof, files are once again named “track 1”, etc.

And we are trying to determine what “bork bork bork” was.

Did you try renaming the files again?

All of the above is 100% accurate, including (especially?) the ‘bork bork bork’. I’ve renamed them again and this time it seems to have stuck- maybe computers are capable of taking hints after all.

There’s a program called TagScanner that is really excellent for renaming and tagging audio files. For future reference in case ‘bork bork bork’ occurs again.