Ripping CDs to the PC If you haven’t yet copied your audio CD collection to the PC, Windows Media Player 11 makes doing so as painless as possible. Know, however, that ripping a CD collection - as those in the know call the copying process - can be quite time-consuming, especially if you have a large CD collection. But before you can get started, you need to make a few configuration changes.

Configuring Media Player to Use the Right Audio Format To configure Windows Media Player 11 for CD ripping, open the Rip menu by clicking the small arrow under the Rip toolbar button and then choose More Options.

There are a number of options here, but we’re primarily concerned with Rip settings, which determine the file format Media Player will use for the music you copy. By default, Media Player will rip music to Microsoft’s proprietary Windows Media Audio (WMA) format. We cannot stress this point enough: Do not - ever - use this format. Here’s the deal. WMA is a high-quality audio format, and much more desirable from a technical standpoint than competing options such as MP3 or Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), the format Apple uses for its own music. But because WMA is not supported on some of the most popular music devices on the planet (read: the iPod), we advise against storing your entire collection in a format that could be a dead end in a few years. So what do we recommend? We recommend the MP3 format, which is a de facto audio standard that is supported by every single audio application, device, and PC on the planet. Yes, MP3 is technically not as advanced as WMA, or even AAC for that matter. But that’s okay. Thanks to today’s massive hard drive sizes, you can simply encode music at a high bit rate. The higher the bit rate, the better the quality. (And, not coincidentally, the bigger the resulting file sizes. But again, who cares? Storage is cheap.)

Ripping Music

To rip, or copy, a CD to your PC, simply insert the CD into one of your PC’s optical (CD, DVD) drives. An Auto Play dialog box is displayed, asking you what you’d like to do. Dismiss this dialog box immediately: Instead of choosing Rip music from CD - which is one of the choices you’ll see in the Auto Play dialog box - you will want to first ensure that Media Player has correctly identified the disk. In Media Player, click the Rip button. The CD you’ve inserted should show up. Examine the disk name, artist name, genre, date, and each track name to ensure that they are correct. If anything is wrong, you can edit it now before the music is copied to your computer. To edit an individual item, right-click it and choose Edit. To edit the entire album, rightclick any item and choose Find Album Info. When everything is correct, click the Start Rip button to begin the copy process. Under the Rip Status column, you’ll see progress bars for each song that mark the progress of the CD copy. Prior to Windows Media Player 10, Microsoft did not include integrated MP3 creation capabilities in its media players. But this functionality is now included at no extra cost. Here’s how you do it. From the Format drop-down box, select MP3. Then, using the Audio quality slider, change the quality to 192 Kbps or higher. Frankly, even with a compressed audio format like MP3, you’re not going to notice much difference above 192 Kbps, unless you’re using high-end stereo equipment. But it doesn’t hurt to future-proof. We use 256 Kbps MP3 for our own CD rips.

Burning Your Own Music CDs When you have a lot of your music on the PC, you’re going to want to listen to it in various ways. On the PC, you can create custom playlists of songs you really like, and if you have Media Center PC, you can even interact with these playlists using a remote control, your TV, and (if you’re really on the cutting edge) a decent stereo system. But if you want take your music collection on the road with you, you have other options. You can synchronize music with a portable device, as described in the next section. Or you can create your own custom mix CDs, using only the songs you like. These CDs can be played in car stereos, portable CD players, or any other CD players. As with ripping, you’re going to want to configure Media Player a bit before you burn, or create, your own CD. To do this, open the Burn menu and make sure that Audio CD, and not Data CD or DVD, is chosen. By default, Windows Media Player 11 copies music to your Music folder. First, it creates a folder named for the group, and underneath that it will create a folder named for the album. Inside of the album folder, you’ll find the individual files that make up each of the tracks in the copied album. You can change the place to which Media Player stores your songs, and the template used to name each file, in the Rip pane of the Windows Media Player Options dialog box. But for most people, the default values are just fine. If you have a CD or DVD player that can play back data CDs or data DVDs, that option will enable you to create disks with far more music. For example, a typical audio CD can contain about 80 minutes of music maximum, but a data CD - with 700 MB of storage - can store 10 times that amount. And DVDs are even larger. Check with your CD player or DVD player’s instructions to see if it is compatible with data disks. When you’re sure that you’re set up for audio CD creation, insert a blank CD. Windows will display an Auto Play dialog boxes with two choices: Burn a CD (using Windows Media Player) or Burn files to disc (using Windows). You can choose the first option or dismiss the dialog box and navigate to the Burn experience in Windows Media Player by clicking the Burn button. When you do so, Media Player displays the List pane and creates an empty Burn List, which is a temporary playlist into which you can copy music to be burned to disk. To add music to this list, click on Library and navigate through your music collection. Then, drag over the songs you want on the disk. At the top of the List pane, Media Player provides a handy progress bar and time limit gauge so you can be sure that your Burn List isn’t too long to fit on the CD. Fill up the Burn List with as much music as you’d like, making sure that you don’t go over the time limit. When you’re ready to create the disk, click the Start Burn button at the bottom of the List pane. When you do so, the Burn experience appears, and Media Player begins burning the

Under the Status column, you’ll see progress bars appear next to each song as they’re burned to disk. Unlike CD ripping, CD burning moves along pretty quickly, especially on a modern optical drive.

Synchronizing with Portable Devices

Although the iPod gets all the press these days, a growing family of Windows Media Player–compatible portable players offers better features and functionality than Apple’s devices, and often at a better price. Although it’s not possible here to enumerate through every single non-Apple device on the market, what you’re looking for, generally, is a portable device that’s labeled as PlaysForSure-compatible. PlaysForSure is a Microsoft marketing campaign aimed at educating consumers about which devices work seamlessly with Windows Media Player.

Using Windows Media–Compatible Devices If you do go the Windows Media route, you’ll find that setup and configuration are simple: Just plug the device into your Windows Vista–based PC and wait a few seconds while Vista configures drivers. Then, launch Windows Media Player 11 and get to work. You can synchronize music with all portable devices, and photos, movies, and recorded TV shows with many of them. What you’ll be able to do is determined by the capabilities and capacity of the player you select.

For those with light needs - a few hundred songs but no photos or videos - a 512 MB to 2 GB flash-based device should work just fine. But even some of these small players are stepping up with video and photo support, so look for crisp color screens, even at the low end. For the ultimate in portable entertainment, you’ll want a device with a large color screen and a massive hard drive. With enough storage space, you’ll have no problems storing all the photos, home movies, and recorded TV shows you want to watch. Whichever device you choose, configuration is largely hands-free and occurs behind the scenes. If you plug the device in while Media Player isn’t running, you will see an Auto Play dialog box that enables you to choose between different choices, including synchronizing with Windows Media Player. You can choose that, or close the dialog box and manually launch Windows Media Player. When you launch Windows Media Player 11, you should see the player listed at the bottom of the Navigation pane. This entry enables you to navigate through the media in your player in the same way you would media on your PC. That’s pretty interesting, in some ways, and it allows you to manually manage the content you’re carrying around with you. But where Media Player really shines when it comes to devices is in its ability to synchronize content between the player and the device. Synchronizing is about more than just copying media to the device. It’s about ensuring that the media on your device is always what you want and is always up-to-date.

Synchronizing with a Portable Device You’ll handle all of your device synchronization through the Sync experience in Media Player which, logically enough, is accessed through the prominently displayed Sync button in the application’s toolbar. Technically, there are two kinds of synchronization: Sync (or what we might call true sync) and Shuffle. You will typically use Sync when you have a large-format portable device (that is, one with multi-gigabytes of storage, possibly hard drive–based). Shuffle is aimed a smaller players, where you can’t possibly fit all of your music collection on the device. To set up a device for Sync, select it in the Navigation pane and then click the Sync toolbar button. Then, open the Sync menu (by clicking the small arrow below the Sync button) and choose the device name in the list and then Set Up Sync. This launches the Device Setup window, shown in article 10-13, from where you will configure which media files you want synchronized with the device. From this interface, you can do a few things. You can set up automatic synchronization, and, depending on the capabilities of your device, sync all of your music, photos, and videos accordingly. If the device is too small to hold all of that content, Media Player will pick which content to sync, based on criteria like ratings and so forth. (This is essentially what Shuffle does.)

Don’t worry about multigigabyte video files clogging up your portable device. Windows Media Player uses a technology called transcoding to copy large video files (and even, optionally, high-quality music files) into smaller versions that are tailored to your device. We’ll examine this capability in the next section.

If you’re the type of person that makes a lot of hand-crafted playlists, you can use the Device Setup window to ensure that only the music you care about is synchronized with the player. It’s all up to you. One final point about Sync: We mentioned earlier that synchronization was about more than just copying. Here’s why that’s true. If you configure a portable device to synchronize with certain playlists, or even, say, your entire music library, the content on the device will be updated every time you make a change to those playlists or libraries. So, if you rip a new CD to your PC and then connect the device to the PC, and that device is synchronized with your entire music library, that new content will silently and automatically be copied to the device. Likewise, if you add (or remove) a song from a playlist that is synchronized with a device, the next time you connect the device, its music library will be updated to reflect the changes you made on the PC.

Using Shuffle If you’re using a small-capacity device, typically one that is based on Flash RAM and contains only a few gigabytes of storage space, you might want to configure the device to Shuffle rather than Sync. In Shuffle mode, the entire contents of the device are replaced with a random selection of songs from your music library, so you always have a fresh set of tracks. You can manually change the track list on the device by opening the Sync menu and choosing Shuffle [device name].

Shuffle isn’t an answer for many people, however. If you have a wide selection of music types in your media library, you might find it a bit jarring as your player moves from, say, classical Mozart to hard rock Van Halen to new age David Lanz. Indeed, many people use smaller Flash-based players while working out, and it’s likely that such people will want a particular kind of music on their players. (David Lanz is hugely talented, but he just doesn’t make good workout music.) So be sure you know what you’re doing before picking Shuffle.

Managing a Portable Device in Windows Media Player Primarily, most of your PC-to-portable device interactions will involve synchronizing content between the two (and charging the portable device). However, there are a number of ways you can configure portable devices in Windows Media Player 11, and some of these options are important if you want to get the most out of your devices. To change the name of your device as it appears in Windows Media Player, open the Sync menu and choose [device name] followed by Advanced Options. In the Sync tab, you can rename the device as you’d like. If you’re not using the Shuffle option, you can also use this interface to determine various synchronization options, such as how much space on the device you’d like to reserve for file storage. (Many portable devices have enough capacity that they make for excellent general purpose file storage devices as well as media players.) In the Quality tab of the same dialog box, you can control how Media Player transcodes music, videos, and recorded TV that is synchronized with the device. The issue here is simple: A 19 GB video file might look great on your PC, but few portable devices are capable of HDTV-quality video and surround sound. So rather than waste valuable storage space on your device, Windows Media Player can make copies of these content types that are smaller and more in line with your player’s capabilities. Transcoding can be quite time consuming, so Windows Media Player does it in the background. If you often take your device along for the morning commute, it might be a good idea to leave Media Player on overnight so it can transcode and synchronize any new content. You can separately configure how Media Player transcodes music and videos/recorded TV. By default, Media Player will automatically transcode content as required. Or, if you feel really strongly about file sizes and quality you can manually choose how the player will handle these media types. Audiophiles can actually use this feature to ensure that Media Player does not transcode music to lower-quality files, ensuring that what they hear on their music player is in the same quality level as the original recordings.

You can also access some portable device options from the Devices tab of the Windows Media Player Options dialog. The quickest way to access this dialog is to choose More Options from the Sync menu. In this dialog, you can select the device you’d like to configure and then click the Properties button to display the Properties dialog we described above. Or, you can click the Advanced button to display the File Conversion Options dialog box, 10-14. This dialog box enables you to choose advanced transcoding options, such as whether video and audio files are converted in the background (which is recommended) and where Media Player stores temporary files.

You can’t use an iPod natively because Microsoft knows that if it did the engineering work to make it happen, Apple would simply launch an antitrust lawsuit. Given this limitation, you might think that getting an iPod to work with Windows Media Player 11 is a non-starter. But as it turns out, an enterprising third-party company, Mediafour (www.mediafour.com/), makes an excellent solution called XPlay that adds iPod compatibility to Windows Media Player. XPlay makes the iPod work just like any other portable music device in Windows Media Player. And as a certain overrated TV personality might say, that’s A Good Thing.

Sharing Your Music Library One of the nicest features of Windows Media Player is its Media Sharing functionality. This feature lets you share your Media Player 11–based music library with other PCs running Windows Media Player 11, various Media Connect–based devices, and Microsoft’s multimedia game machine, the Xbox 360.

Why would you want to do such a thing? Well, with many homes having two or more PCs these days, it makes sense to save some disk space and utilize your Wi-Fi (or wired) home network to access music, photos, and videos that are stored on other PCs. In one typical scenario, you may have a desktop PC with a large hard drive on which you store all of your media content. Using a wirelessly equipped notearticle, you can easily access that content from elsewhere in the house. Or you can access that content using a network-attached device such as a media receiver or Xbox 360, neither of which offers a lot of local storage.

Share and Share Alike: Setting Up Your PC for Sharing Before you can share your Media Library content, however, you’ll have to do a bit of configuration. First, the PC must be connected to your home network, and you must have configured the PC’s network connection to access your network as a private network. If you haven’t done this, here’s the quickest way. Right-click the network connection in the system tray and choose Network and Sharing Center. Then, in the Network and Sharing Center window that appears, click Customize below the network map. In the Set Network Location dialog box, choose Private for location type and click Next.Then Click Close. Please note that you’ll need to repeat this process on any other Windows Vista–based PCs with which you’d like to share media libraries. This step isn’t required for Windows XP. Next, you will want to configure Windows Media Player 11 for sharing. To do so, open the Media Player, open the Library menu (by clicking the small arrow below the Library toolbar button) and choose Media Sharing

In Media Sharing, select the check box Find media that others are sharing, if you’d like to find other shared music libraries on your home network. If you want to share the music library on the current PC, select the Share My Media check box, and then examine the icons that represent the various PCs and devices that you can share with. Select each in turn and click the Allow button for the devices with which you’d like to create sharing relationships.

If you’d like to determine the type of content you want to share, click the Settings button. You can choose between music, pictures, and videos, and choose whether to filter via star ratings or parental ratings.

Connecting to a Share Music Library with Windows Vista When you’ve shared a music library on one PC, you’ll be prompted to set up sharing on any other Windows Vista PCs you have in the house. 10-17, you’ll be prompted to establish a sharing relationship with the PC that is sharing content.

To establish this relationship, you can click the balloon window. However, the window fades away pretty quickly (presumably because it’s annoying). If this happens, you can still set up sharing: The sharing icon remains in the tray notification area. You can rightclick this icon to set up sharing (Open), disable future notifications, or Exit (which will allow future sharing notifications to display. Or, simply double-click the icon to set up sharing. In the Windows Media Player Library dialog box that appears, you can choose to Allow or Deny the other PC’s request to access your shared media. You can also click a Shared settings button to access the Media Sharing dialog described in the previous section. After you’ve established a connection with a shared media library, you’ll see it appear in the Windows Media Player’s navigation pane. You can expand and contract the list under the PC’s name just as you would your own library, search for and access media, and play music and video files. There are some limitations, of course. You can’t change the contents of shared media libraries, burn them to CD or DVD, or perform any other actions that might violate the media owner’s rights.

Connecting to a Share Music Library with Xbox 360 With Xbox 360 game consoles now found in tens of millions of homes worldwide, Microsoft has found a perfect way to share PC-based music libraries with a device that is probably connected to the best TV display and stereo system in the home. Thankfully, the process is incredibly simple.

1. After you’ve configured Windows Media Player 11 to share its media library, ensure that your Xbox 360 is connected to the home network, and then turn it on. You will see a Found Windows Media Center Extender balloon window, but you can ignore this for now (unless you’re using your Windows Vista–based machine as a Media Center PC; in that case, check out Article 13 for more information).

2. You will also see a balloon window appear for sharing with the Xbox 360. Double-click this icon and click Allow in the resulting dialog box. Alternatively, access the Media Sharing dialog box as described previously and make sure the Xbox 360 is configured to allow sharing.

3. Access your Xbox 360 and navigate to the Media blade, 10-18. This part of the Xbox 360 user interface allows you to interact with PCbased digital media, connected portable devices (like iPods and other MP3 players), and even external hard drives with stored digital media files. Right now, of course, we’re just concerned with sharing media content from a Windows Vista–based PC.

4. To play shared music, select the Music option to display the Music page. Then, select Computer. If this is the first time you’ve done this, Xbox 360 will need to download Windows Media Connect, which is the same software many devices use to stream media from Windows Vista–based PCs. After this download is completed, Xbox 360 will search for PCs that are sharing media libraries. Select the correct PC from the list.

Now you can access your PC’s media library using a simple menu that consists of albums, artists, saved playlists, songs, and genres (  10-19). Xbox 360 also includes a full-featured media player for playing back this content. As you might expect, photos and videos are accessed in a very similar manner. If you attempt to access photos or videos from an Xbox 360 or other Windows Media Connect device and receive a “No photos found,” “No videos found,” or similar message, then you’re not sharing any content of this type. To add photo or video content to Windows Media Player, you can either add it via Windows Photo Gallery ( 11) or use the Find Media steps described earlier in this article (hit F3) to manually search folders that include photo and video content.

Accessing Online Music Stores Although Apple’s iTunes Music Store is the current market leader, a host of Windows Media–compatible online music services are also available, and these services all work pretty nicely from within Windows Media Player 11. One service, however, stands out above all the rest, because of its deep integration with Media Player. It’s called URGE, and we’ll look at this one first.

URGE At a very basic level, online music services all perform the same functions. They provide music for sale (so-called a la carte downloads, where you can purchase individual songs or albums) or, in some cases, provide subscription music services, which let you access all of the service’s music, on a number of PCs and even portable devices, for a monthly or yearly fee. Music services also typically offer editorial content, ways to discover new music, or find out additional information about your favorite artists and albums. They often supply custom playlists, and other content.

URGE, which is owned by MTV but codesigned with Microsoft, offers all of these features. So you might wonder what the big deal is. After all, don’t services such as iTunes and the various Media Player–compatible online music services described later in this article do the same thing? Sort of. What makes URGE unique is its deep integration with Windows Media Player 11. By now, you should be familiar with the fact that Media Player 11 presents your media library to you visually, using new interaction points like stacks and album art. Well, URGE works the same way, and you can browse around URGE’s entire music collection - well over 2 million tracks at the time of this writing - in the same way you browse your own collection. Yes, seriously.

Launching URGE To see how this works, you need to install URGE first. To do so, simply click the URGE button in the Windows Media Player 11 toolbar. Media Player will walk you through the steps necessary to download and install URGE if you haven’t already done so. Then, click the Sign In button on the toolbar to create a new account or use your existing account.

Navigating the URGE Media Library If you click around URGE, you might not see what the big deal is at first: Much of the URGE interface is very similar to other services. But to see URGE’s deep integration into Windows Media Player 11, you simply have to know where to click. The easiest way to see this integration is to expand the URGE entry in the Navigation pane and then click

Genres. In the Contents pane, you will see stacks of genres, just as you would for your own media library. The difference is that URGE’s genres all contain humongous collections of music, 10-20. And you can dive right in, just as if URGE was stored on your own hard drive. If you double-click a genre stack, you’ll be brought to a custom URGE page from which you can explore further. But you can also do some pretty crazy stuff from this interface, although you’ll need to subscribe to URGE’s subscription music service to hear full-length songs. For example, you can right-click on one of these stacks and choose Play to hear every single song in that genre. If you’re not a subscriber, you’ll only get 30-second samples. But you get the idea: If it’s in URGE’s collection, you have access to it, just as you do to your own music files. You can also perform other related functions, like adding all of a genre (or other URGE collection) to the Now Playing playlist. Or, from an URGE subpage, you can use the toolbar along the bottom of the player window to navigate songs, albums, artists, and other groups just as you would your own collection. In article 10-21, you can see URGE’s Alternative genre, sorted by artist name. Very cool.

At the time of this writing, URGE is not supported on (x64) 64-bit versions of Windows Vista. Microsoft tells us that this should be fixed by the time Windows Vista is made widely available to the public.

Other Music Stores Although URGE is pretty exciting, it isn’t the only online music service game in town. To access other services that are compatible with Windows Media Player 11, you have to dig a little bit: Open the Online Services menu (by clicking the small arrow below the URGE button in the Media Player toolbar) and choose Browse All Online Stores. This will present you with options to install support for other services such as Audible.com, MSN Music, Napster, Puretracks, and XM Satellite Radio. Frankly, if you’re new to the online music service market, URGE is probably the way to go. But if you already have an account at Napster or one of the other services, they’re all still available - if somewhat deprecated - in Windows Media Player 11.

You can switch between any of the Media Player–compatible online music services at any time. After you’ve installed and configured any of the music services that are available from within Windows Media Player 11, you can simply open the Online Services menu and pick the service you’d like to use. You’ll see an entry for each configure service. Note, however, that none of the other services integrate with Media Player 11, or its Navigation pane, at least not at this time.

Summary Windows Media Player 11 is the most full-featured version of Media Player yet, with a simpler and more visual user interface, awesome media sharing capabilities, and integration with some of the most exciting online music and video services ever offered. You can even make Windows Media Player 11 work with Apple’s stunning iPod, if you really want to. There are plenty of free competitors out there, but many Windows Vista users will find everything they need right there in Windows Media Player.