I have a family member who is a dedicated Real Player user. Time and time again, he runs into this same issue. Either because he upgraded RealPlayer, or his external hard drive got disconnected and he needed to reconnect, either of the above or combination of above scenarios always ends up with all of my relatives RealPlayer files having their custom title lost.

To give an example of what happened recently, my relative's computer had the external hard drives unplugged and by mistake they were not reconnected.

Then before they were reconnected, it appears that Real Player was upgraded. Now that we have reconnected the external drives, it looks like we have lost all custom title metadata for all the files that were previously part of the library.

To expand on this a bit further, a common occurrence I notice when upgrading Real Player is that certain settings get cleared out to defaults - example, if we specify a custom folder for downloads and for the general library to be on an external disk, the upgrade resets that setting and by default look for files in the c:\username\documents type of path etc (this seems to happen every time RP gets upgraded)

My relative customizes the songs/files/videos to have a custom title (which Real Player allows by clicking the title and renaming.) The original filename stays in tact when you do this. For some reason across upgrades or re-importing of files that were imported previously (and in the case of this combined external drives disconnect + RP upgrade) not only do we lose the default settings for the library location and have to re-add and re-import the files, but all the custom titles my relative created are gone, titles that he painstakingly made as he has a custom naming convention that he prefers and works for him. Now he has to (because he really doesn't see any other way to do it that suits him) rename all the songs that were re-imported (even though Real player between upgrades should have retained those values.)

It seems clear by now that when you rename files in your library, none of that data ever makes it way into the file's metadata itself. Instead it must be saved in some other kind of database file as part of RealPlayer internals, hidden somewhere within the program application path.

With all that said, is there anything I can do to help my relative avoid future loss of custom file titles by some how backing up whatever db file Real Player creates when you customize titles of all imported songs/videos in your library? So that in the event that a RP upgrade somehow loses those names, they can be retrieved and somehow re-imported (possibly by simply replacing the db file in the RP application path?)

Any insights here would be greatly appreciated, this has been an issue for years now and my poor relative just keeps plowing ahead because he loves RealPlayer despite him having to re-title his library over and over again every couple of years.

Thank you.