Please help - Windows 10 issue

[HaloUK]

Hi guys, When I rip my music CD's to my computer it wont download any of the album art/name/track names. I have a feeling its happened since I blocked all the spyware on Windows 10 and a search on the internet has provided the below fix but how do I find this line? What exactly am I meant to do once I have found it?

Many thanks.

"Might check your hosts file in the windows\system32\devices\etc and make sure that the redir.metaservices.microsoft.com host name hasn't been included with 0.0.0.0, this happened on my system after I used an application to turn off the Microsoft tracking in Windows 10, simply commenting out this line allowed WMP to then find album info quite happily"

 

[KIA]

The file path is wrong.

It's C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

Search for notepad > right-click > run as admin
Navigate to the path and open hosts
Find the entry

 

[HaloUK]

Think I have sorted it.

 

[Zefan]

I have never experienced this exact issue but I can help you with what that is asking you to do. This is likely entirely overboard, but I'm ill and I have nothing better to do

The hosts file is an ancient bit of Internet functionality that has survived through the ages. It is a simple text file, and its original job was to act as a local store of hostnames and their respective IP addresses on a network, which made it possible for our puny brains to use the Internet without having to remember 12 digit IP addresses for every system or "host" on the network! All we did was remember the hostname, type it in, and the hosts file would remember all the numbers for us. The job is now done by DNS, but in Windows you'll find it will still use the address specified in the hosts file over anything provided by DNS.

What this is asking you to do is to check your hosts file for an entry that will have the effect of redirecting all request to communicate with redir.metaservices.microsoft.com to a bogus IP, 0.0.0.0.

Normally, an app or service will try to communicate with that hostname, check the hosts file, find nothing, then go on to ask a DNS server for the IP of that hostname. The DNS will respond with the correct IP, and communication between your app or service and the system with that hostname will begin.

If the hosts file has a line added like you describe, an app or service will try to communicate with that hostname, check the hosts file, be pointed to 0.0.0.0 by the line in question, and then fail to work because 0.0.0.0 doesn't point to the right place on the network. It won't go on to check the actual IP with a DNS server, as Windows prefers the hosts file, and the attempt to communicate will fail.

To check your hosts file, navigate in Explorer to C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc and open hosts.txt in notepad. To "comment out" a line, all you need to do is add a # to the beginning of the line. This will have the effect of making Windows ignore everything on that line.

It does mean that any previous "fix" applied that relied on this line to block communication with Microsoft, will now be undone.

 

[HaloUK]

Zefan, bless you mate for that long post but thanks to KIA's original post and a bit of detective work its now working. I really appreciate your time and help.

KIA, thank you very much, all is working as it should.