Windows Media Player Album Database Offline

Question

It seems like Microsoft of whatever entity that handles the album database for Windows Media Player, either legacy or not, has taken their website offline. I know it changed in the past from being handled by Microsoft directly sometime in 2018, and the domain changed, specifically to "musicmatch-ssl.xboxlive". Because of this, when I put a music CD in my drive, it can't read any of the metadata, leading to albums with no artwork, no album info, and no track listing.

It appears this is a very new problem, as Dec 14, 2025 it was working fine, I ripped a CD and the album updated info automatically. Yesterday, Dec 15, 2025, not one CD, that I had not ripped before, showed up with any album information. And attempting to update the album info through the internet feature resulted in an error that a connection could not be established.

Why did this happen and is there a way to read the album metadata without this online album database? This next line is more rant but how is it that my car's stereo and my 15 year old CD player can read and display this information natively without an internet connection or need for a separate third-party program, but my my $1,500 computer cannot?

Answer 1

This seems like a widespread issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/WindowsHelp/comments/1pnn8qz/anyone_elses_media_player_having_trouble_updating/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5666756/when-playing-music-cds-all-of-the-artist-and-track?page=0&orderby=Helpful&translated=false#answers