Windows Media Player has been hobbled

I rip my music CDs for my personal use, and since the 1803 Windows update in April, Windows Media Player throws up a “webpage cannot be found” error when I attempt to find information for more obscure albums. It continues to work fine on my Windows 7 laptop. Is there a remedy for this? MALCOLM SHORE

Rob Mead-Green replies: Malcolm had already noted that Windows Media Player has changed the site used to obtain music metadata to fai.music.metaservices.microsoft.com. It may well be that the problem is fixed in a subsequent update, but Microsoft is deprecating Windows Media Player over time, and so now might be the moment to source a more modern alternative. Our preferred choice is the brilliant – and free – MusicBee, which is a lightweight but powerful alternative to Windows Media Player. MusicBee is available to download either from the Microsoft Store or https://getmusicbee.com. Even if you plan to keep using Windows Media Player as your music player, you can use MusicBee exclusively to rip CDs – press Alt-R to bring up the Rip CD dialog. Click ‘Settings’ to verify which format to rip to (MusicBee supports WMA, MP3, AAC and others) and where to store your music before verifying the information and clicking Start Rip. Press Ctrl-O to open Preferences and select Tags (2) to see which databases MusicBee searches (MusicBrainz, freeDB and last.fm by default) by default. Click the ellipsis (…) to add Gracenote – other providers

can be added as plugins (for example, Discogs – https://getmusicbee.com/addons/ plugins/13/discogs-tagger/).