I’ve been cloud-first on my laptop for months now, streaming songs directly from my Google Drive on Windows Media Player Legacy. However, something broke recently, and so for the past few weeks, my Windows Media Player "Library Locations" stopped persisting across restarts. Songs had to be re-added every single time, and play counts kept resetting to zero.

Glad to have finally debugged this with Claude Code today through a process of trial and error to finally find a working fix! Notes below:

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𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺: WMP Legacy drops the Google Drive music folder from its library after a system restart, and play counts reset to 0.

𝗙𝗶𝘅: Make the Drive music folder appear as an ordinary folder on C: using a junction, and add that to WMP instead of the G: path.

  1. In Command Prompt (not as administrator), run:

  𝘮𝘬𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘬 /𝘑 "𝘊:\𝘜𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘴\%𝘜𝘚𝘌𝘙𝘕𝘈𝘔𝘌%\𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤\𝘎𝘋𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤" "𝘎:\𝘔𝘺 𝘋𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘦\𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤"

  •  (%𝘜𝘚𝘌𝘙𝘕𝘈𝘔𝘌% is filled in automatically by Windows. Change the second path to match your Drive music folder.)

  2. In File Explorer, check that C:\Users\<you>\Music\GDriveMusic opens and lists your songs.

  3. In WMP, press Alt > Organize > Manage libraries > Music > Add, choose GDriveMusic, and click Include folder.

  4. Let it scan, play a song, then restart, wait for Drive to settle, and test again.

A junction survives restarts, so no startup script is needed. If G: isn’t ready, the link just looks empty until it is.

𝗖𝗮𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Deleting the junction itself is safe (rmdir "C:\Users\<you>\Music\GDriveMusic", never rmdir /s), but deleting files inside it deletes them from your Drive.

𝘾𝙤𝙣𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙢𝙚𝙙 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙤𝙣 𝙢𝙮 𝙡𝙖𝙥𝙩𝙤𝙥 (𝙥𝙖𝙩𝙝: 𝘾:\𝙐𝙨𝙚𝙧𝙨\𝙐𝙎3𝙍\𝙈𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙘\𝙂𝘿𝙧𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙈𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙘), 𝙊𝙘𝙩 17𝙩𝙝 2026.