I just got an external DVD/CD hard drive to rip some CDs onto my laptop, but I'm running into a problem. The drive plays the tracks perfectly fine, but it doesn't display any album or artist information. Instead, everything shows up as 'unknown album' and tracks are labeled as 'track 1', 'track 2', etc. I've already tried uninstalling the device and checking for updates, but it says everything is up to date and functioning normally. I even tested it on another laptop, and I'm seeing the same issue on both Windows 11 systems. Has anyone dealt with a similar problem and can offer some advice?
2 Answers
Historically, many CDs didn't have embedded metadata (like CD Text). The album and artist info used to come from databases like CDDB. Ripping software can usually access these databases to retrieve the info. Sometimes with newer CDs that include CD Text, I've noticed that even that data can show up oddly formatted. It's possible that your current drive just isn't retrieving the metadata.
Are you sure you're actually ripping the CDs and not just copying them? What software are you using to perform the ripping? Also, what file type are the tracks in? This can impact how the album info gets displayed.
I used Windows Media Player Legacy. I haven’t even ripped any CDs yet because the data isn't showing up. It's the interface that appears when I insert the CD, if that makes sense. Here’s a screenshot: 
Yeah, that's probably it. The converter drive I used before could read the CDs and pull up that info just fine, so it must be something about this particular model that doesn’t support it.