Windows Media Player Playlists

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dirkpitt45

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Friend of mine runs a DJ company and his main laptop's screen is cracked and mostly useless now. So he bought a new one, little toshiba with a centrino and vista. The place he bought it from put all of his music (~10k songs) onto the new one, but they didn't transfer the playlists.

The old laptop is running xp, and works fine apart from the screen. I've got all of the playlists saved, but I'm not sure how to open/put them on windows media player in vista. All of the songs are named exactly the same, and in the wmp library. He's made up a few playlists just as temporaries, but there's 30 something others on the old laptop, would just save boat-loads of time if we could just transfer them over.

I'm thinking its just a hard to find option or something like that. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Check in the Music Folder. There should be a folder called Playlists right in there. Just put the old playlists in that folder and you are all set to go.

If not create this folder and within WMP just add that location to your Library and they should show up for you.

Either that or you can try to find where the newly created playlists are stored and just copy the old ones over to that location.
 
I got one playlist to show up, just a test one. Rest of them won't show up in the library, put them in "my playlists" and selected it for "add to library", and only the one showed up. It doesn't work, says the files cannot be found. I think I know why though. The songs are there, but in the folders they're labelled as "##Track##", then once in WMP they have the actual song name, artist, ect. But the tracklists go by the original file names; so is there a way to revert all the names back the original names? Maybe clearing WMP library and adding them all again while disconnected from the internet, and getting all the playlists working first, then connect to the internet and let it update the names.

Would that work? Or there has to be an easier way for all this, itunes playlists are easy :/.
 
That is the thing. If you changed the file name or location, then you have to rebuild all of the playlists. This will happen with any software. If you change the location of your files or the names outside of the program that you used to build them then you have to start all over.

For iTunes you have the playlists backed up at some point. Be it on your iPod or uploaded to your account with the software. So it is far easier for those lists to be adapted to such changes. For WMP it is not cause you changed the core of the playlist. The location and the name. How can you expect a playlist to work if none of the information used to create it is the same?

Sorry to say but nothing you try is going to work. You will have to rebuild from scratch.
 
ok to preserve your music library even through reformats please do the following:

locate your media player appdata folder (on vista/7/2008 it is located in /user/appdata/local/microsoft/mediaplayer) (on xp it think is located in the documents and settings/application data/microsoft/mediaplayer).

there should be two files there:
CurrentDatabase_360.wmdb
and
wmpfolders.wmdb

locate these on the old system

and copy them over via network/pendrive or other removable media

then put them in the smae location on the new pc.

then place the playlists in the same directory structure you had them before.

this works for me if I reformat and I have even used this on several computers if I kept the file structure in tact. makes it so awesome and portable for me.

hope this helps.

also you can go into the playlists with notepad and alter directories like;

Ok if I have dancemixmay2010.m3u:

song1.mp3
D:\Music\album\song1.mp3
song2.mp3
D:\music\album\song2.mp3

and you now have the songs in drive E:

go to notepad and use 'find and replace"

and replace those drive letters above with E:

this works as well if drive letters have changed but structure hasn't.
 
Gah, well that's gonna be a pain, ah well thanks for the help anyways.

@Remix, thanks I'll try that in a couple mins, pizza time!
 
Ehh, don't have those files, there's a skins folder, and a playlist file thats titled "0638635".

Under C/Documents and settings\Name\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player
 
Well he said that the laptop was running XP. WMP 8 came with XP and was later updated to WMP9. You had the option to get WMP10 and WMP11. The question is did he update to the latest version before his laptop broke?
 
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