Windows 7 Media Player won’t add MP3 files

It seems that this is actually the normal behaviour. USB memory sticks show up in Windows Media player but only for syncing files - there is no play option. The only way I could find of opening the files is to use File -> Open... from the main menu. It is possible to open several files at once by dragging a selection rectangle over them.

I used to use Media Player to play from my external hard drive by setting it as a library location but this isn't allowed with most memory sticks as they Media Player detects that they are removable devices.

If you have a spare external hard drive then you could try using that instead and add it to Windows Media Player's library locations. To do this, right-click Music in the left-hand pane, then choose Manage Music library and click the Add... button.

Unless you are really set on using Windows Media Player, my advice is to download foobar2000 and install it on to the memory stick in portable mode - suitable for use at work as no files need to be installed on the host computer. Using Library -> Configure you can tell it to look at a folder on the drive that contains music, and any new files get indexed automatically.

I figured this out, for the most part. There are several factors at work here.

1. You do indeed add new folders by adding them to the Videos Library, which can be done from Windows Explorer or Windows Media player, as described in the question.

2. The files are indexed after being added to the library. I'm not sure exactly what process does this, but I believe it has something to do with Windows Media Player itself. It sometimes seems to speed the process up if you launch Windows Media Player after adding a new folder to the library.

3. Many large files will take a while to index and appear as available over the DLNA connection. I do not see anywhere that you can check the status of this, but that would be a great feature for Microsoft to add in the future.

4. Some DLNA clients appear to cache the list of files from the server and I'm not sure how to force them to manually update the list. This was also causing me to think that no new files were added. I confirmed this caching is happening by taking a server offline. The files still showed up as available.

The answer is, add the folder to the library and wait. How long? No clue. I found it easiest to add a new folder to put a small video file in a folder and then add it to the library. Then I can easily test that the new folder is being indexed for the DLNA server.