Playing music stored on USB drive

**Taksal** · 02-08-2009

Usually I carry all my MP3 files on a USB drive so that I can listen them at home or Office. Thes files works fine on my office computer but when I connect them on my Home PC running with Windows vista and windows media player 11, it come up with the following error message:

"Windows Media Player cannot find the file. If you are trying to play, burn or sync and item that are in your library, the item might point to a file that has been moved, renamed, or deleted."

And at the same time if I copy those files on my desktop or anywhere on local hard drive, it works fine without any problem. Somebody please tell me what is the problem?

**Winckle** · 02-08-2009

If am not wrong these files were already synced with WMP library before you copied/moved them to USB Drive, right? If yes, then USB drive probably got a different drive letter assigned by Windows, and the filenames in WMP's library still have the old drive letter. Hence WMP recognize them as invalid. The only thing you need to do is remove everything from the library and add them there again.

**Taksal** · 03-08-2009

I think the problem was with the naming of files but thanks for your help. Anyway, I tried to play those files on Dell Media Direct and they worked fine. After this when I played them using Windows Media Player they worked fine with this as well. I have seen many people facing various problems with WMP, so I think I should now permanently switch to dell Media Direct.

**dorothee** · 09-10-2009

Well, if this could help anyone: I had music ripped to an external hard disk which was given a different letter one day after I used a USB key. That was very annoying because Real Player could not find the files anymore.

Instead of starting over with the ripping and everything, I renamed my hard disk letter using this very straighforward procedure:

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Windows-X...name-Drive.htm

However, this is annoying if files on WMP are assigned many different letters for the same drive... There must be a way to get around this whole issue, other than changing player...

I am running on Windows XP.