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[bmetelsky]

Title says it all. The playlist function in the WMP widget (Dark Matter Suite) is not working at all. Any suggestions would be great.

[Roman]

Hey everyone,

Your errors seem to point to a media library read error. It might be possible that your WMP library is corrupt or may contain a single corrupt item. This is not a rare occurrence, but usually WMP will try to fix itself. The widget is designed to sort your music albums and display them on the custom playlist. Here is where the widget seems to fail.

I can't say that this is definitely what's causing it since i can't reproduce the error on several computers, but you can try restoring the media library and it might fix it.

Please note that this will reset all your Windows Media Player album entries and playlists. Your songs and videos are not erased, but you will need to add them to the library again.

You can find instructions in this Microsoft KB article, but i've broken it down to make things a little easier:

This works only for WindowsXP & Windows Media Player 11

First step is to close Windows Media Player and the widget. If you are sharing your library with Media Center or XBOX 360 or any network device, you'll need to turn that off. You can do that through the WMP options. Select the "Library" tab and click on the "Configure Sharing" button. Deselect the "Share my media" checkbox.

Next step is locating the library database. You'll be able to find it within this directory path:


C:\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player


replace [user name] with your specific user name.

You will see one or several files with the *.wmdb extension along with some folders and XML files. This is your media library database. To back it up simply move the contents of that folder into another folder of your choosing. Moving the files might take a while depending on the size of your library.

Make sure the folder is completely empty, and start Windows Media Player. Now try running the widget in debug mode and see if you get the same error. If all works well, you should see the default WMP playlists on display when you click the playlist button.

If this does not fix your problem, you can restore your library by closing all Media Player dependent programs and going back to the folder. Delete the new library files and move back the files you backed up. Re-start Windows Media Player.

Let me know if this works for you guys.