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Mark Tyson Social Links Navigation News Editor Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
Jame5 Migrated to Foobar2000 (Yes, the Winamp competitor) for my media player/CD Ripping solution on Win11. My only serious complaint is that it seems to encode the ID3 tags weirdly. Means the apostrophe (') come out as a string of characters rather than a plain apostrophe. Reply
Dr3ams I've been using JetAudio for years. JetAudio use to be an all-in-one media player that also played video, but the devs split the two and tried to sell them seperately. That didn't go so well. JetAudio and JetVideo are now completely free. The Windows Media Player has never been as good as third party apps. I don't know why Microsoft keeps it around. Reply
ezst036 When they rename it to CoPilot Media Player app (like they've done for Office) it will regain this functionality through AI. Maybe. Reply
Ogotai i use exact audio copy for cd to digital, and media player classic, which is part of K Lite codec pack for my audio listening… and MPC for video as well… havent used the built in windows media player for ages now…. Reply
Misgar I don't know if this ruling still applies in 2026, but the British courts made a change to the 2014 act and in 2015 it became illegal again to rip audio CDs in the UK. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-33566933https://www.copyrightuser.org/understand/private-copying/https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2014/2361/made Perhaps Microsoft couldn't be seen to be condoning music "piracy" in the UK?:):):) Reply
Jabberwocky79 I was wondering what happened! I noticed this last week. Although I no longer have a disc drive, so I wasn't even burning anything, just trying to play something in my library and I noticed that none of the artist images appeared anymore. Reply
King_V When we tell Microsoft that we want bloat and unwanted features removed from their products, this isn't what we mean. Reply
BillyBuerger This doesn't appear to be any change to their software as far as removing functionality. It sounds like they just shut down the service they used by default to for getting this info. Other CDDB sources exist. I would assume you can update Media Player to look at these instead. Or just use something else since Microsoft doesn't seem to care about this anymore. I'm also in the foobar2000 camp for my audio listening and for the rare occasion when I do still need to rip a CD. It wasn't too long ago that I re-ripped a large amount of my CD collection as I previously did so with either MP3 or OGG and wanted everything in FLAC instead. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/windows-media-players-find-album-information-functionality-has-been-removed-youll-have-to-find-other-software-for-playing-and-ripping-cds-with-relevant-track-information#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.