I had this problem before with Windows Media Player 11 (and it seems from searching Google that the problem is widespread) but was hoping someone out there might know how to fix it.

Basically when I try to rip a CD with Windows Media Player 11 it does not populate the album information and metadata. Even when I right click on the album (which shows unknown album when I put it into my PC) and select “Find Album Info” and WMP finds the correct album from their meta data provider, when I click “Finish” and try to apply the metadata it does not get applied to the CD that I’m trying to rip.

This problem happens with all CDs that I try to rip on my brand new Dell PC. I do have “connect to the internet” checked in my settings.

Although I could delete my Windows Media Player folder and try to start over from scratch, I’m hesitant to do this because my media library is large and it takes at least a day to repopulate my library on my PC and another day each for my three XBox 360 extenders.

Does anyone know of a way to force WMP11 to accept the album metadata under the “find album info” command when it won’t accept it?

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As folks know, I bought Vista to run on VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro. I’d felt it was slow and bloated but I figured I’d give it a good run to really make up my mind. What I like about Vista:

• The UI is nicer than XP. XP always felt like a cartoon and earlier versions of Windows were just… dull.
• The security level actually made me feel more comfortable about the integrity of the O/S. That said, it never alerted me to any suspicious activity or hacking attacks…
• In general, I found the organization of the O/S more intuitive - after the initial learning curve. It felt a bit more “Mac-like” in some indefinable way.
• It is stable. Much more stable than any previous version of Windows I’ve used (and I’ve used every version since 3.1). Apart from reboots for security updates (more on that below), I had Vista up and running for days, even weeks sometimes, just putting the Mac to sleep, switching networks without problems and so on. Rock solid.

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