WMP: problems with rip & transfer to MP3 player

In the normal course of events, I have no problem ripping a CD and then adding it to my MP3 player.

BUT, trouble starts where the data for the CD cannot be found, or is wrong. Then I need/want to manually edit the album name, artist, track titles etc. Otherwise I end up with it all filed under "Unknown Artist" with no meaningful track titles.

This happens most frequently with audiobooks, that don't have a huge following, and so don't have info, or don't always have the correct info on auto-retrieval services.

All I want to do is rename album and tracks correctly. But the problem I have is when and where to do this, so that they end up correctly filed and designated on my MP3 player.

I don't understand the relationship between files in C:\Documents and Settings\Myusername\My Documents\My Music and the WMP library.

If I've understood correctly, the latter should be ONLY links, and not duplicates of the files? But if so, then if I update the filenames of the real files, how do I get this to propagate into the WMP library? Or should I be correcting the info ONLY on the links in the library, and leaving the actual files alone?

This latter appears to work fine, until I try to use WMP to load them on my media player, and then everything loses the info I've just typed in, and ends up bunged on the player as "unknown" again.

I've deleted the whole lot and started again from scratch about 3 times now - right back to ripping the CD. I still can't seem to end up with correctly named files, in the correct directory structure ("correct", in this context, meaning the same way all my other media files are arranged, which is the top level directory is the artist, and inside, subdirectories representing all the albums of that artist, which in turn contain the tracks).

Just totally fed up now.

Can anyone explain simply where/how (i.e. inside WMP or elsewhere?) I need to rename the files for the stuff to end up correctly named and organised on my player?

I had this problem ages ago with the Harry Potter Books, that I wanted to rip as normal, to my MP3 Player.

However, the HP Books were all arranged so that there were only General chapter headings but there was a new track for every minute of speech ! ! !

Yup, one track for every minute! on all Seven Books, thats 104 CD's with a track every minute! ! ! !

It would appear, certainly from the first prints of the CD that I bought, that they were all deliberately named almost identically. which meant when you ripped them as normal from your WMP to hard drive it just mixed them all up and you had bits from books flying all over the place ! ! ! !

The ONLY solution I found to this was to use another CD Audio Ripper to put the files into a seperate directory for each disk and then work my way through, track my track, disk by disk, renaming them into something that meant something to me!
Like for the very first track of the first CD of the first book, HP-01-01-01 etc etc.

It was a right royal PITA, but it was the only way I coudl do it without WMP interfering! Once it was all done, I turned WMP back on and let it sort things out, whch it did using the naming convention that I had created for the CD's.

It was long winded but worth the effort.

I don't know who dreamt up the way they named the files on the CD's in the first place, either they didn't know what they were doing, or they did, and wanted to stop the casual listener transfering it all to their MP3 player ! ! !!

In reply to a post by TrevorSP:

I had this problem ages ago with the Harry Potter Books, that I wanted to rip as normal, to my MP3 Player.

However, the HP Books were all arranged so that there were only General chapter headings but there was a new track for every minute of speech ! ! !

Yup, one track for every minute! on all Seven Books, thats 104 CD's with a track every minute! ! ! !

It would appear, certainly from the first prints of the CD that I bought, that they were all deliberately named almost identically. which meant when you ripped them as normal from your WMP to hard drive it just mixed them all up and you had bits from books flying all over the place ! ! ! !

The ONLY solution I found to this was to use another CD Audio Ripper to put the files into a seperate directory for each disk and then work my way through, track my track, disk by disk, renaming them into something that meant something to me!
Like for the very first track of the first CD of the first book, HP-01-01-01 etc etc.

It was a right royal PITA, but it was the only way I coudl do it without WMP interfering! Once it was all done, I turned WMP back on and let it sort things out, whch it did using the naming convention that I had created for the CD's.

It was long winded but worth the effort.

I don't know who dreamt up the way they named the files on the CD's in the first place, either they didn't know what they were doing, or they did, and wanted to stop the casual listener transfering it all to their MP3 player ! ! !!

Thanks Trevor. I'm glad it's not just me. I was starting to think I am stupid!

I'm just trying again today, in hopes that a new day, and a bit more patience and clear-headedness, might result in success this time.

But it's certainly more of a pain than it ought to be.