Windows 8 Bible

Music, Metadata, and Searches

Earlier in this chapter you discovered how you can store media information such as artist, album title, genre, and so forth with songs. That media information is a form of metadata. Metadata, in turn, is information about a file, and it doesn’t apply only to music. Pictures, videos, Microsoft Office documents, and many other file types support metadata.

Tip

Whether or not you are in Windows Media Player, you can search for and group things based on metadata in any file.

You don’t have to be in Windows Media Player to take advantage of metadata. The Search features in Windows 8 allow you to search and group things based on metadata in any file. For example, if you select Search from the Charms Bar and type an artist’s name into the Search box, songs by that artist show up in the Files window (click Files under the search box).

You’re also not limited to searching for one thing. You can specify multiple criteria separated by the words AND or OR (uppercase letters). For example, here’s a search that finds all tracks in which the composer is either Beethoven or Mozart: composer:beethoven OR composer:mozart.

Tip

You might think that it should be composer:Beethoven AND composer:Mozart. But it doesn’t work that way. A song can’t have both Beethoven and Mozart as the composer. You’re looking for tracks that have either Beethoven or Mozart as the composer.

If you want to locate all MP3 songs that have Nickelback as an artist and a year greater ...