With the Introduction of Windows 8, a new native application was introduced along with the Microsoft operating system, known as “metro” which was later renamed to “modern”. Windows has plenty of modern apps along with a separate marketplace to download them just as PlayStore for Android. This article is about to discuss a particular issue that makes albums and its artists show up as ‘unknown’ in Groove music player app.

Symptoms

In the “Albums” section, the affected albums are shown as depicted in the following screenshot. Notice that, both the Album and its artist’s names are marked as “unknown.”

Solutions

Solution 1: Let Groove Update the Album Information

If the music file is downloaded from a file sharing website, the chances are that it may not have the meta information which consists in a set of information which are necessary to display the album information and the artist’s name. Not having the meta information makes groove show the music file as unknown as there is no information to read from the file. The following method demonstrates how to download the meta information automatically from the Internet.

1. Open the Groove Music app from windows start menu

1. Locate the cogwheel icon next to the email address of the user (if logged in otherwise log in before doing this step)

1. Move the cursor a bit downward of the window to locate “media info” category, then turn it on to download the meta information automatically.

Solution 2: Manually Editing the Meta Information of the Music Files

If the music file isn’t popular or if its meta information isn’t available in Microsoft servers, manual editing is unnecessary. Even though it’s a walk in the park with a single file, it can be quite frustrating if there are hundreds of files, and thus a third party application such as Mp3Tag is required to edit the files.

1. Visit the following web URL

http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

1. Download the application by clicking on the mp3tag<version>setup.exe

1. After installing the file, open the application from the windows start menu

1. Navigate to the folder where music files are located

1. Drag and drop the music files into mp3tag.

1. Highlight the files to be edited, and then from the left-hand side panel, write the album name in the “album” field, do the same thing in the “artist” field.

1. Click on the “Save” button to save the changes

1. Then it should look as in the following screenshot.

1. Navigate to the following folder address.

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.ZuneMusic_<RandomNumber>\LocalState\Database\<RandomNumber>

1. Delete its folder. Make sure the groove is closed before deleting the folder. Otherwise, Windows won’t allow deleting certain files in the folder which is about to be deleted.

1. Reopen Groove to see the changes on the album.

Removing Duplicates (Recommended):

While you’re fixing unknown songs, albums and artists information in Groove, you may also encounter duplicate songs in Groove. You can fix those song duplicates using Clone Files Checker and keep your music organized.