Can anyone tell me why Windows Media Player changes the name AC/DC to AC;DC under the Artist column on the library tab? I’ve tried changing the name to ACDC, but WMP still changes to AC;DC or sometimes DC;ACDC.
Thanks!
Robert
I’m not sure of windows media player applies your tagging in it’s software to the file name, but i suspect that it’s due to the fact that in windows (and most os’s) you can’t really have a “/” in the file name because it could potentially confuse the file system. After all, to your hard drive/windows, “/” equates (more or less) to a directory path.
I thought the “/” was confusing it as well. The actual file name is simply ACDC, but the tag is AC;DC. I was hoping there was a way around that. Oh well…
Looks like a bug. I’ve got AC/DC’s live album (titled, unimaginably, AC/DC Live), so I dropped it in to WMP. The artist shows up as AC; DC, but the album shows up as AC/DC Live. All the tags render correctly in Winamp, so I blame Microsoft for this one.
You could try “AC|DC” (shift backslash)
I use iTunes, so I don’t really know.
Odd. The slash (/) is used as a directory path separator in practically every desktop computer OS except Windows. (Old Macs, prior to OS X, used the colon (
IIRC, but OS X is a Unix and Unices use slash.) Windows uses the backslash () it inherited from MS-DOS, but a nagging memory seems to make me think you can use a slash in Windows as well. In some contexts, at least. Maybe. I’m using Linux right now, and I’m not going to boot Windows just to test this.
On a related note, I have noticed that “Peter, Paul and Mary” gets changed to “Paul and Mary Peter” probably because the software is written to assume that a single word followed by a comma represents the last name of the artist.
In my Windows Media Player library, I have a track with the artist as “Adam & The Ants/Adam Ant” and another with “Budd/Fraser/Guthrie/Raymonde,” suggesting that WMP itself doesn’t have a problem with forward slashes in that field. If the value was limited by directory path conventions, you couldn’t have question marks, either (which are not valid in filenames under any 'Nix/'Nix clone or Windows verison).
It’s not a path issue. My mp3s are stored under %music%\AC_DC\AC_DC Live, and that’s fine. WMP is misreading the Artist field of the ID3 tag for some reason.
Ok, then. One theory is shot to hell.
False. I’m running Linux right now and I have a file on my harddrive named ?. (Yes, I created this file expressly so I could be a smartass in this post. It serves no other useful purpose. ;)) I have to quote it to access it in a command line, but that’s true of a lot of characters legal in filenames, such as spaces.
However, maybe Linux is special in this case. I also have files named rôle and 25¢. I don’t have to quote those names in any way.
(I’m using the ext3 filesystem, if there are any other Linux geeks around today.)