Hello, I cannot get rid of several music albums listed as "unknown album" by "unknown artist" in the list of music albums. How can I proceed?

Many thanks for wour help!!! Eric

 Wow, no one responded?  This can be approached in several ways.  If you are like me and are a dialup user, open up to the net and then open MC.  Sometimes, as long as it is music that has a registering tag on it, MC will use the net to find the meta data.  This may take a couple minutes to match up data depending on how many songs you have.  Now, if you can, by process of method find that such ALBUM by such ARTIST has an unknown SONG, and you recognize it as "Chop Suey!" by "System of a down" from the album of "Toxicity", you can  right click on the song and EDIT.  Same applies to other methods like you know it is "Toxicity" album and the song is "Chop Suey!" just by searching around and clicking / right clicking and find the band name missing, again, right click and edit.

Another way, use Windows Media Player.  In here the same applies, but you can right click and do "Find Album Info"...if you have Zune, again this applies to that.

Another way is to go to your "My Documents/My Music" and look here for folders named "Unknown" or look deeper into "My Recordings" and look for such folders.  Finally, you can look the hard way and look in each of your KNOWN folders and right click on ANY song file and right click and go to properties.  Click on the Summary tab.  Use the Advanced button at the bottom.  If you know the data, you can literally type in the data necessary here.  Sometimes all it takes is album and track number, from there using the above method of opening Windows Media Player (or Zune if you have it) and find the offender and use the right click "Find Album Info" while dialed up to the net.

 Usually if I find a folder named "unknown", I will name it who it is and maybe even sub folder the album it comes from, but this is just a matter of preference, but great organization skills.

Hello,

Thanks for your contribution! It is not that I'm missing meta data, I used all the methods you describe to complete "my music" library, but now that I'm finished, everything is complete, when I ask for "albums", my MC is showing me all my albums, all fine, plus 3 "unknown albums" which are showed but empty (no songs), which cannot be deleted when I delete them and which are not named when I name them through "album info". MC cannot find them, but keep showing them. Quite nerving... And as you mention, I cannot identify them and kill them through the explorer "my documents/my music"...I could suppress one "unknown album" who had in fact an "unallowed character" in the directory giving the album name (the unallowed character was entered though the MC interface who let that character which you could not enter using the "windows explorer" command "name/rename directory".

 Now I'm hopeless and I cannot remove these 3 bloody "unknown albums" from the page showing the albums in MC... Has anybody also experienced that and has a good idea to definitely delete these "unknown albums"?? Of course a Windows bug, but how can I/we go around it?

I would much appreciate your help. EXPERTS, WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE ARE THE FREAKS AND WHAT DO THEY PROPOSE???

Eric

Hi, Eric.
The 'experts', frankly, don't travel this folder (MCE2k5 & earlier) much anymore.  Sorry - many moved on to Vista; of those who didn't (as well as those who did), Win7 came along.  And, we like it.  :)
So, the forum apologizes.  ;)

About that problem:
Assuming that you're verified that all of the tag info in your files is correct (most importantly:  Album, Album Artist, Artist, Title, and Track number), the only way (that I know of) is to do a reset (translated:  wipe and rebuild) of your WMP database.  Yes, that's right - WMP.  MC uses the WMP library database.

Instructions:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925718

HTH