How-To Rebuild Your Windows Media Player 12 Library

If you have an Xbox 360 or a Windows Mobile phone, then your best bet on syncing all your music and media would be Windows Media Player 12. Sadly enough, you may have already encountered problems refreshing your library and keeping things tidy.

But, with these simple steps, you can rebuild your music library in just a few clicks.

How To Rebuild The Windows Media Player 12 Library

Step 1 – Disable The Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service

First of all, make sure that Windows Media Player is closed. To start, Click the Windows Start Menu Orb and Type services.msc in the search box. Then Press Enter to open the Services window.

From the Services window find the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service. To disable it, Right–Click it and Select Stop. A small dialog box may temporarily appear while the process is stopping.

Step 2 – Delete The Library Database File

Keep the Services window open; we’ll need it again, later on, to re-enable this service after we first eliminate a few files.

Open up Explorer and Browse your way to:

From here delete all of the files named CurrentDatabase_***.wmdb and LocalMLS_*.wmdb. (Warning – there are several LocalMLS_*.wmdb files, make sure to delete them all!) (Note – The “*” stands for a random number, the numbers differ on each machine, so we can’t really tell exactly what the file is called. There are only a few files, though, you should find them easily.)

Step 3 – Re-enable The Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service

You can now close the Explorer window and get back to the Services window. From the Services window, find the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service again, but this time when Right-Clicking select Start. Again, a small dialog box will temporarily appear while the process enables itself.

Step 4 – Refresh Your Library

Now all you have to do is open up WMP 12 and watch your library rebuild itself. Depending on the amount of songs you have, and how fast your computer is this process can take from 30 seconds to 15 minutes. For my little 429-track library, it took less than 2 minutes, which is quick keeping in mind that ALL my tracks (yes, all of them) are tagged with album art and all other information.

Conclusion:

This trick will certainly help you whenever you’re having library problems with WMP 12. But let’s hope that we can forget all about Media Player issues and other annoying problems once Service Pack 1 For Windows 7 is bought out to the public.

49 Comments

Thank you! I am one happy Mofo now!

This was EXACTLY what I needed to know, thank you for the clear and concise directions! I just finished tagging ALL of my songs with album art (7200 of them) and want WMP to recognize this art instead of it’s stupid 200×200 art.

this bug in WMP12 is so damn stupid
thanks for the help

tx so much help out alot

Thanks. Sometimes my ITunes puchases show up in WMP, sometimes they don’t. I use this trick when they don’t.

Thank you! I had my music on my E: drive and moved everything over to my C: drive, which apparently caused WMP12 to have some sort of breakdown. WMP11 was so much easier. I hope MS can get their act together. Why fix what ain’t broke?

@Allan – hey I’m happy the article helped ya out. And yeah, I can’t tell you how many times my favoriate apps have been ruined after the DEV’s decided they needed an upgrade….

thanks forum,you guys are the bomb,i just got my music library back,thanks once more

Excellent! Glad it worked out. Do you have a large library?

Another thanks on an awesome article. Much needed to get my updated music library from my external into WMP for BlackBerry Media Sync.

Thanks Steve. I was going crazy trying to figure out how to delete and rebuild the library (until your great instructions).

Thanks man! You really made my day. This tutorial helped me solve my music library problems with the still buggy WMP12. Now my WMP reads all my albums like a charm! Good job! 🙂

Thank You; Thank You; Thank You! This was EXACTLY what I needed!

This metod didn’t work for me.. deleting the music library locations folders (the entries that say which folders should be included in the library) and then adding them again did work however.

Btw:
1. only 429 files.. I almost feel sorry for ya.. although it must be handy to know, and be able to organize, each and every track you have.

2. you don’t need the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service to build a library because I’ve it disabled.

3. building the library took me clearly more then 20 minutes – my pc isn’t even slow or anything and don’t have all the file tags filled in or don’t even use the album art – after which I decided to do something else.

I followed your instructions to rebuild WMP but I’m still not seeing some albums that I see in WMP but not my music library. What else can I do to get all my albums in my music library?

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Oh, my gosh… Can’t thank you enough! My Windows Media Player was showing files that had been deleted and I was ready to throw my computer out the window!!

Thank you for these instructions, which I have used a couple of times now.

This time around, I have had an odd glitch. As well as rebuilding WMP, I decided to clear out my MP3 player, a Samsung YP-P3, using the player’s own Format command.

Afterwards WMP rebuilds its own library fine, but when I use it to Sync to the Samsung player, the music syncs fine, but most tracks show the album and artist as unknown, which makes it kind of hard to choose the music I want.

Wow! Did this ever solve my problems. Thanks, Thanks, Thanks.
I’ve been struggling with this hangup partially caused by having Itunes installed as well as WMP. Now I’m educated enough to prevent this from reocurring.

Thanks. If only MS was as helpful. Why do they change WMP all the time? I swear Win 7 and all the new MS programs, are exactly the same as XP and its era of Programs, just with all the menus and buttons hidden. So annoying. I know MS Programs inside and out, yet I’m stuck staring in confusion at the new Office, WMP, ect.
Rant over.
Thanks again, very helpful.

Thanks for this clear explanation. Your fix worked perfectly, clearing up my deleted files and finding the new ones.

Oh my god – would only let me delete the MLS files but now my massive 400gb music collection is reappearing – thanks.

It won’t let me delete the currentdatabase_372.wmdb file. It says it’s in use. I’ve tried ending processes, but no go.

A batch file to automate the process: Open Notepad and paste the following:

@ECHO OFF
ECHO Ready to rebuild Media Database. Are you sure you want to continue?
ECHO Close to cancel.
PAUSE
NET STOP “Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service”
TIMEOUT 2
DEL “%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player\*.wmdb”
TIMEOUT 2
ECHO Rebuilding Media Database.
ECHO Please wait until Windows Media Player has finished before continuing.
START “” /D “C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\” wmplayer.exe
PAUSE
SHUTDOWN /R
EXIT

The SHUTDOWN /R command reboots the computer, necessary if you’re using WMP to stream to a networked device (i.e. Xbox 360,) feel free to remove it if that’s not your case. Save as either a .bat or .cmd. Run the batch file any time you need to rebuild your database.

to be quite honest, I am very computer illiterate. these directions worked perfectly the first time. they were easy to follow , which is very necessay for me. thank you very much for taking the time to answer my question so quickly

Awesome! I’m glad it help you out. Welcome to GroovyPost!

Jos Trumpet Humphrey

Thanks for the post, i needed it !

thank you very much for this.. it helped a lot keep up the great work.

Doesn’t work for me, not for movie files, but works for music files and images, how comes?

Everything worked except I couldn’t delete the “currentdatabase_372”. Reading through the comments below, looks like you don’t have a suggestion. Thanks anyway.

Could not “browse” my way to %USERNAME%\ because it does not exist on my machine.

Had you written (as another site had) “\Users\YOUR USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player” it would have helped more but even here my name is not in place of “user”
Why not just take the mystery out of it?
C:\…User\My Documents\App Data\ect….

It did work for me fortunately. It seems %USERNAME% was not mentioned in the article when I read it today, but %USERPROFILE% was, which in my case pointed to c:\users\. Big thanks to Steve on the help for this issue. First time reader and will continue to visit from here on out. Keep up the good work and thanks!

WORKED LIKE A CHARM. THANKS SO MUCH

Unfortunately, your suggestion has not helped. My WMP12 has two issues – perhaps related. First, a year ago I added a set of folders from an external drive to the set of library locations in the organize->manage libraries->music, but I don’t want those locations used anymore to build the database, but no matter what I do when I restart WMP12 they are back again. Of course, I stopped all sharing services and then I removed them using the remove button, but they are always there when I restart WMP12. I went to the Media Player folder in my user account and deleted all wmdb files; the folders came back. I deleted the entire Media Player Folder – same result. I went into the control panel and unchecked Media Player and Media Services and restarted then re-checked WMP and then restarted presumably to load a whole new WMP; same result. The second problem is that whereas I can drag individual music files into WMP and it will add the file to the library, when I drag and drop a folder, whereas the little popup icon says it is adding the folder to the library like it should, no music from that folder appears to be added. So I go into organize->manage libraries->music and just add the folder I want there and the folder appears in the list, but nothing else happens. No music actually appears to add. Then of course, when I restart WMP, the folder I added isn’t even in the organize->manage libraries->music list and the old folders are back. Help Help.

re-run cmake or configure script in function cvShowImage #8537

Comments

parsibox commented Apr 7, 2017

The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered:

alalek commented Apr 7, 2017

Rebuild the library with Windows, GTK+ 2.x or Carbon support. If you are on Ubuntu or Debian, install libgtk2.0-dev and pkg-config, then re-run cmake

Your OpenCV binaries were built without UI backend support, so UI functions (imshow/waitKey/etc) are not available.

BTW, You can dump the current configuration (got from CMake) using this line:

parsibox commented Apr 7, 2017

parsibox commented Apr 7, 2017

how can i build OpenCV whith UI backend?

alalek commented Apr 7, 2017

Usually you just need to install packages (including «dev» versions of QT/GTK) and after that rerun OpenCV CMake from clean build directory.

parsibox commented Apr 7, 2017

i install from brew
can you say in brew how can i install qt/gtk dev package ?

alalek commented Apr 7, 2017

We don’t maintain brew package manager.

Please ask usage/installations questions on Users OpenCV Q/A forum: http://answers.opencv.org

henriqueblobato commented Jul 13, 2017 •

Here the steps I make to make GUI functions work

Uninstalling OpenCV
sudo apt-get purge libopencv*
sudo dpkg -r opencv

Check
sudo dpkg -r opencv

Then, go to the build directory and
sudo make uninstall

After, you can rebuild with this make command
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local -DFORCE_VTK=ON -DWITH_TBB=ON -DWITH_V4L=ON -DWITH_QT=ON -DWITH_OPENGL=ON -DWITH_CUBLAS=ON -DCUDA_NVCC_FLAGS=»-D_FORCE_INLINES» -DWITH_GDAL=ON -DWITH_XINE=ON -DBUILD_EXAMPLES=ON ..

OpenCV not working properly with python on Linux with anaconda. Getting error that cv2.imshow() is not implemented

This is the exact error that I am getting. My OS is Ubuntu 16.10.

OpenCV Error: Unspecified error (The function is not implemented. Rebuild the library with Windows, GTK+ 2.x or Carbon support. If you are on Ubuntu or Debian, install libgtk2.0-dev and pkg-config, then re-run cmake or configure script) in cvShowImage, file /feedstock_root/build_artefacts/work/opencv-3.1.0/modules/highgui/src/window.cpp, line 545 Traceback (most recent call last): File «untitled.py», line 7, in cv2.imshow(‘image’,img) cv2.error: /feedstock_root/build_artefacts/work/opencv-3.1.0/modules/highgui/src/window.cpp:545: error: (-2) The function is not implemented. Rebuild the library with Windows, GTK+ 2.x or Carbon support. If you are on Ubuntu or Debian, install libgtk2.0-dev and pkg-config, then re-run cmake or configure script in function cvShowImage

0002.png is an image in the same directory as the program. I first installed anaconda with python 3.5, then I installed opencv by using the command

I installed libgtk2.0-dev just as the error said to but I still get the same error. Any help would be much appreciated. I’ve been trying to solve this for several hours.

15 Answers 15

1.The easiest way:

or (for OpenCV 3.1) :

2.And if u don’t want to do this, you can try to use matplotlib .

3.Or try to build library by your own with option WITH_GTK=ON , or smth like that.

Update — 18th Jun 2019

I got this error on my Ubuntu(18.04.1 LTS) system for openCV 3.4.2, as the method call to cv2.imshow was failing. I am using anaconda. Just the below 2 steps helped me resolve: