WMP Tag Support Extender 1.4

WMP Tag Support Extender is an old plugin that taught Windows Media Player to read and edit tags in music formats it ignored on its own.

It has not been updated since 2007, and its own project page now points people to WMP Tag Plus instead.

Keep it for an old PC running an old player, and use a maintained tagger for everything else.

What WMP Tag Support Extender Actually Does

Windows Media Player builds its library from tags - the artist, album, title and year stored inside each music file. Back then it read them from MP3 and WMA files and left formats like FLAC and APE out of the picture.

This plugin added full read and write support for APE tags in Monkey's Audio, Musepack, WavPack and OptimFROG files.

It handled FLAC metadata too, and could read, but not change, tags in AAC and M4A files and Vorbis comments in OGG files.

You edited everything straight from the Media Library, with no separate program to open.

It only ever handled the tags. Playing those formats still needed the right DirectShow decoders installed.

Why It Fell Behind

The plugin dates from the Windows Media Player 9 and 10 era. The reviews on this page report it doing nothing in Windows Media Player 11, and it was never updated for version 12.

Its project page says plainly that it is no longer developed or supported, and names WMP Tag Plus as the replacement. That is the developer's own advice, and it is the right call.

Who Can Still Use It

It only makes sense on an old Windows XP-era machine still running Windows Media Player 9 or 10, where the newer plugin will not install. Everyone else should skip it.

The tell is your player's version number, shown under Help, then About Windows Media Player (press Alt if the menu is hidden). If it starts with 11 or 12, this plugin is the wrong tool.

What to Use Instead

If you want to stay inside Windows Media Player, WMP Tag Plus is the direct successor. It supports Windows Media Player 12 and adds FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, WavPack, Monkey's Audio, Musepack and MPEG-4 to the library.

If you would rather fix tags once and have every player see them, a standalone tag editor is the better tool:

• Mp3tag is a popular free Windows tagger, quick at renaming files and batch editing whole albums.
• MusicBrainz Picard is open source and fills in tags for you by matching files against the MusicBrainz database.
• Kid3 Tag Editor is open source too and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.
• TagScanner is strong at building tags from filenames and the other way round.

If you are ready to leave Windows Media Player, MusicBee and foobar2000 both come with their own library and tag editor, with no plugin needed.

More taggers and library managers are on our Media Managers page.

Quick questions

Download WMP Tag Support Extender 1.4 if you still need it, or tell us what you used it for if you have history with it.