Did Media Player do this to my Computer?

[Yooka]

Hey guys, how's it goin'.

First off, let me start by saying I dislike Microsoft, and I avoid dealing with their products whenever possible... erm, practical.

Secondly, Winamp is my preffered Audio player. It's because I don't know crap about WMP that I ask this question. Tried searching for it, but I couldn't find any useful answers. Maybe some of you more well informed and educated audiophiles can gimmie a simple answer on this.

I'm going through my parents computer, trying to find the source of it's problems. Usually, it's the same ole' spyware crap, but I've checked that. Right now, I'm just going through the comp to backup the important stuff - like Dad's porn (kiddin).

I notice that in addition to the usual collection of mp3s, we've got alot of wma's. My experience with them is minor, but every now and then I DL something in wma, and it usually works ok.

I notice that there are an awful lot of these wma's, and they are in a terrible inefficient, and obviously automated file structure. About a zillion folders, most of them blank, all of them with a date of usage in the folder name. And in some of them, there's a wma file of appropriate size. Oh, the hiierachial tree structure is in Recording Artist order.

So I'm looking through them, and transferring them to my compy, which serves as a lifeboat... and I realize something. My folks own alot of these tracks - like bought from the store. Now, aside from having a clue as to where to DL some music from, they really don't know much about computers at all. They didn't rip any music from CDs they own. Not intentionally anyways.

However, they used to use WMP, since it's the default. So I got to thinking... does Media Player make copies of all CDs you play with it? because these are 2-4 meg files, and it knows album and artist info, and stays true to the original's song order. And like I said before, I can't imagine how or why my folks would have so many wma's of things they already own. I can't play any of these from the computer they were on - because it only starts in safe mode. I can't play them on my computer (the transfer vessel), because my computer doesn't have the "digital licence" (IE pops up a page when I try to run it).

Thanks guys.

[Vargas]

if you have autoupdate media enabled (it is by default) it will download covers and metadata info from the web when you play files with wmp

[Yooka]

Thanks. Turns out a friend of mine hit me with the full details on this. Turns out by default, some versions of Media Player copy ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING it plays onto your "My Music" folder. Every CD and MP3 - right into the hard drive without ever knowing. What a great idea. Anyway, easy enough to disable in options.

Thanks again for the reply, though.