As you may remember, Windows 7 is reaching its end of life in less than a year. Microsoft has started retiring services and features related to this OS. One of them is a service that allows fetching metadata for music, films, and TV shows. The service will no longer be available in Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center apps for Windows 7 and Windows 8 users.
Existing metadata will remain available in Windows Media Player. This means that metadata that was already downloaded, such as album covers, meta tags, directors and actors, will remain available. However, the information won't be downloaded for all new media files. The change doesn't affect basic WMP features. It will continue to play your local media, and streams. If you rely on the metadata supplied to Windows Media Player, you need to upgrade to Windows 10.
The updated support page on Microsoft's website explains the situation as follows.
Going forward, you may be unable to view information (metadata) such as the title, genre, and artist for songs, and the director, actors, cover art, and TV guide for movies in Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player. After looking at customer feedback and usage data, Microsoft decided to discontinue this service. This means that new metadata won’t be updated on media players that are installed on your Windows device. However, any information that’s already been downloaded will still be available.
This change doesn’t affect any major media player functionality such as playback, navigating collections, media streaming, and so forth. Only secondary features that require downloading of new metadata are potentially affected.
It is unclear what the reason is for Microsoft to terminate support for the metadata service, since Windows 7 will be supported till January 2020. Despite that, this move gives the user yet another reason to upgrade to Windows 10, which may be the actual reason for the change. Microsoft is greatly interested in making all Windows users switch to the latest version of the OS.
Thanks to Windows Latest.
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So besides telling us the obvious you got a solution ? A registery hack to use another service ?
I just use AIMP and foobar2000 on Windows.