I'm trying to use WMP's CD ripping capability with some
lectures-on-CD and I'm having a fit trying to get my
"album" and tracks labeled.

After inserting the disk and going to the Rip tab, it shows
the CD as having unknown title, unknown artist and no track
names.

This isn't a problem, I understand how the disc contains
none of that information. I'm happy to enter the requisite
data, but WMP makes it very hard.

First of all, I see how I can manually edit the track
information directly on the screen, but how do I give the
"album" a title and artist name? I can't see any way to
enter this information directly. Also, I'd like to use the
same artist for all the individual tracks (in addition to
an overall artist name on the album), but WMP makes me
enter the name once for each track.

Of course I've tried the "Find Album Info" method, but this
can be even more bizarre.

The "Find Album Info" is actually helpful as I use "Type
information for a personally created CD..." to get a set of
fields I can fill in, such as Album title and Artist name
for the album in addition to the track names. Plus, when I
enter an artist for an individual track, it nicely copies
the same artist to all tracks. (Of course, why it won't let
you move on without giving at least one track a name is a
complete mystery to me...and inconvenient.)

However, when I try to "Finish" with these fields filled
in, the player often seems to thrash while updating the
Media Library. It seems to be looking for this "Album" on
the internet (metaservices.windowsmedia.com ???), despite
the fact that I just told it I'm typing in names for a
personally created CD. While sometimes the method works,
correctly renaming the fields of my ripped files as I
indicated, frequently it comes back with a message "The
service is not available at this time, click CLOSE and try
again later." Then it loses all the information I entered. Ugh.

I don't have to tell any of you how ridiculous this is.
While super-duper internet lookups for album information
are clearly very useful, why is it so difficult to do the
simplest of tasks, like entering track and album data
manually? OK, editorial over.

Can someone help me here? How do I name these albums and
artists without all these hassles?