Finding and Managing Your Music

If you already have a bunch of CDs that you’ve ripped to the PC, or other digital media content, and you want to make sure you can access it easily from Windows Media Player, you should take a moment to tell Media Player where that content is. By default, Windows Media Player monitors certain folders for content. These folders include the current user’s Music folder, the All Music folder, the current user’s Pictures folder, the All Pictures folder, the current user’s Videos folder, the All Videos folder, and, if you are using Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate editions, the Recorded TV folder.

Finding Your Music

You can speed media detection by telling Windows Media Player to manually search for media. This can also be helpful when you’ve chosen to store media in a nonstandard location. To do this, click the small arrow below the Library button in the Windows Media Player 11 and select Add to Library from the resulting pop-down menu. This displays the Add to Library dialog box, which lets you manually find media and add other folder paths to the list of folders that Media Player monitors. By default, Add to Library displays in a supersimplified view style. To add nonstandard folder locations to the monitored folders list, click the Add button. Note that you can choose to add volume-leveling information to each imported file, which slows the importing process but ensures that each media file plays back at a consistent volume level. This can be hugely important if you often shuffle songs from different sources. When you click OK, Media Player will manually search its monitored folders list for new media. If you want to manually add songs to the media library, you can also select them in Windows Explorer and simply drag them into Windows Media Player’s media library. Behind the scenes, Windows Media Player will not add those folder locations to its monitored folders list, but will only add the dragged media to the media library. Table 10-3 highlights the keyboard shortcuts used for managing the media library.

Managing Your Music

As you add music to your collection, you may discover that Windows Media Player’s reliance on album art as a visual means for quickly finding your music is a liability, since some music won’t have the correct album art. Instead, you’ll just see a black square. If this happens, fear not: It’s easy to add album art to your blanked-out music. There are two ways, manual and automatic. To manually add music to your blanked-out albums, browse to the Amazon.com web site using your web browser and then search for each album, one at a time. The Amazon.com web site is an excellent repository of album art: Simply click the See Larger Image link that accompanies each album and then drag the image from the web browser onto the blanked-out image in Windows Media Player, 10-9. Voilà! Instant album art. The manual approach works well if you only have a few missing bits of album art, but if you have multiple missing pieces of album art, you’ll want to use a more automated method. There are many ways to do this, but Windows Media Player actually includes a Find Album Info feature that, among other things, helps you add missing album art. To trigger this feature, navigate to an album that’s missing album art in the Media Player media library, right-click the offending album, and choose Find Album Info. This displays the Find Album Info window. Find Album Info is pretty simple: You just choose the correct album from the available selections, and you’re off and running. But this tool has a huge problem: It works on a track-by-track basis, even when you select an entire album. And that’s not automated enough. Instead of Find Album Info, try another right-click option, Update Album Info (unless, of course, you don’t want Microsoft messing with your carefully massaged media files, in which case you’ve probably skipped over this section anyway). Update Album Info is totally automated: If the online database that Microsoft licenses for Media Player has your album correctly listed, you should see the album art appear pretty quickly. own hands and try a third-party utility. One such solution is Art Fixer, which scans your media library and looks for missing album art. The application then runs through each of your albums with missing art, one at a time, and presents possible solutions. Pick the one you want and move on. You can download Art Fixer at

www.avsoft.nl/artfixer/.

Playing with Photos, Videos, and Recorded TV Shows In keeping with its name, Windows Media Player is about more than just music. You can also manage and access other digital media content, including photos and other pictures, videos, and recorded TV shows. For purposes of Windows Media Player, “recorded TV shows” refers to files that are stored in Microsoft Digital Video Recording (dvr-ms) format. This is the format used to record TV shows with Windows Media Center, which we examine in Article 13.

Accessing Photos with Media Player Unlike its predecessor, Windows Media Player does manage your photo collection by default (in Windows Media Player 10, you had to manually enable this functionality). To access your photo collection, click the Category button and choose Pictures. This will put the media library in Pictures view, shown in article 10-10. By default, you will see all photos.

When you double-click a photo in Pictures view, Media Player switches to Now Playing and displays the image in a slideshow with the other pictures around it. You can use the standard Media Player navigational controls to move through the playlist, shuffle the order, and so on. You can also click Back to get back to the media library. Media Player’s support of photos isn’t fantastic, and you should probably use Windows Photo Gallery - described in Article 11 - to manage your photos, because it includes decent editing tools. But there’s a reason Media Player supports photos: so you can synchronize them with a portable device and enjoy them on the go. We look at Windows Media Player 11’s support for portable media devices later in this article.

Playing Videos and DVD Movies Because of its history as an all-in-one media player, Windows Media Player 11 is an excellent solution for managing and playing videos that have been saved to your PC’s hard drive. These movies can be home movies you’ve edited with Windows Movie Maker ( 12) or videos you’ve downloaded from the Internet. Windows Media Player also makes for an excellent DVD player.

As with Windows XP, Microsoft doesn’t make it particularly easy in Windows Vista to access your Videos folder, which is where you’ll typically store your digital movies. And like Windows XP, you can’t add a shortcut to the Videos folder directly to the ride side of the Start Menu. Instead, you will need to open your user folder (the first link on the right side of the Start Menu and then open the Videos folder from there). Yes, it’s dumb.

You access digital videos in Media Player by choosing Video with the Category button. Videos display as large thumbnails in the media library by default, and double-clicking them, of course, plays them. You can make video playlists, which is actually pretty useful. Just open the List pane and drag over the videos that you want in a new playlist. Out of the box, Windows Media Player 11 supports a wide range of popular video formats, including MPEG-2, Windows Media Video (WMV) and WMV-HD, and AVI. But Media Player does omit support for a few popular formats, notably DivX and XViD, which are growing increasingly popular online, and QuickTime, Apple’s near-ubiquitous format for movie previews. Fortunately, there are ways around these limitations. To add support for the popular DivX and XViD formats, you can simply download files that will add support for these formats from the Web. The free version of DivX is available from the DivX Web site (www.divx.com/), whereas XViD codecs can be downloaded from

www.xvid.org/.

QuickTime is a bit trickier. Sure, you could download Apple’s free QuickTime Player, or pony up $30 for QuickTime Pro. But neither of these would let you play back QuickTime content in Windows Media Player 11 or Windows Media Center. To gain this functionality, you’ll need to turn to QuickTime Alternative, which is available on the Free Codecs Web site (www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alternative.htm). This excellent bit of software enables you to play QuickTime files in Media Player, Media Center, and even your web browser. Did we mention it was free

In previous versions of Windows Media Player, you needed to download a $10 DVD decoder in order to add movie DVD playback functionality to the player. In Windows Media Player 11, this is no longer an issue: For the first time, you can now play DVD movies in Media Player without having to go to the pain and expense of finding and purchasing extra software. That said, Windows Media Player’s support for DVDs is pretty barebones, and you don’t get the wide range of functionality offered by third-party solutions such as Cyberlink PowerDVD (www.cyberlink.com/multi/products/main_1_ENU.html) or InterVideo WinDVD (www.intervideo.com/jsp/WinDVD_Profile.jsp). If you don’t mind paying a bit, these products offer features like intelligent zoom for widescreen displays and various headphone output modes that simulate surround sound.

Playing Recorded TV Shows If you’re using a Media Center PC, or a PC running Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate edition and a TV tuner card that’s connected to a TV signal, you have the capability to record TV shows (which we discuss in Article 13). TV shows recorded with Windows Media Center are aggregated by Windows Media Player 11 as well, and appear in the media library when you select Recorded TV from the Categories button.

As with videos, recorded TV shows are shown in a nice thumbnail icon view by default. But if you already have Media Center on your PC, why would you want to access these shows in this fashion? Actually, there are a few reasons. First, you might want to synchronize your recorded TV content with a portable device so you can access it during the morning commute, on a plane, or in other mobile situations. That’s the primary reason this content type shows up in Media Player. But what about users with laptops? You might have Media Center on your desktop PC or Media Center PC, but if you’re running a different Vista version (or a previous version of Windows) on your notearticle computer, you can use Windows Media Player to access that content: Just copy the shows you want to watch to your notearticle, take them on the road, watch them, and then delete them when you’re done.

Seriously, delete them. Media Center content takes up massive amounts of hard drive space. Thirty minutes of recorded TV takes up almost 2 GB in Vista’s version of Media Center. Yikes. Thankfully, you can make these files smaller using Windows Movie Maker. We tell you how in Article 12.

As you might expect, Windows Media Player supports a wide range of keyboard shortcuts that are related to videos, DVDs, and Recorded TV shows. Table 10-4 shows them.