I wanted to test out media sharing to a Windows 7 PC. My music server is running Vista and has quite a lot of music on it.
The sharing feature seemed unreliable for me – sometimes when I would connect to the remote library it wouldn’t show any media, and other times it would only show some of the files. The following steps seem to force it to work:
- First, delete the cached library metadata for the remote library. The file(s) will be named something like
_HME_HOME_uuid-33b809d3-d8aa-c83d-5197-c38cfbcd27be,_0.wmdb. - Then open up Windows Media Player on the PC you want to share to.
- Click on the remote library and go to the Music section.
- Leave WMP open while it quietly does it’s thing. Be patient, it could take a long time. Don’t touch it until you’re positive it is done and it’s at the “Z”‘s. The most time-consuming part of this seems to be transferring the album art files over the network.
Note to Microsoft – why in the world wouldn’t you give the option to check progress feedback of the remote library refresh? Or at the very least put up an alert so we know it’s done and ready to use?