One of the more prominent reasons I use Windows Media Player is for its seemingly unique monitor folders tool. After recently moving all of my media onto a centralized location on my network, I was hoping this feature would continue to work seamlessly, i.e. keep ‘monitoring folders’ for file updates, removals, or whatever. Long behold, after adding the network share to the associated ‘locations to monitor’ list, a wmp directory scan found all of the media files and iterated through each and every one of them without actually adding anything to the library. Weird.
After a few days of craziness, I finally ran into a solution at: http://weblogs.asp.net/chuckop/archive/2005/03/18/395139.aspx
Essentially the fix entails declaratively removing the “system” attribute from your media files since, apparently, wmp doesn’t like adding file/attribute pairs like that into its monitor routine (although you can add them to the library manually). In my case I’m not sure how the attribute ever got there to begin with (it definitely wasn’t there originally), but I suspect it had something to do with me transferring files through a device controller running linux/samba.
I’m still on the fence as to whether or not this was a viable programming or business decision on wmp development’s part (I suppose one could contest to the fact that true ‘system’ files need not be monitored), but nevertheless there are loads of people having issues with this.
For more info on modifying the system attribute, visit: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326549
Stephen Sulzberger's Blog 