Give Microsoft a little credit: When it launched its first all-in-one media player - Windows Media Player 7, with Windows Millennium Edition (Me) in 2000 - the company made it clear that this product would be about more than just music: Today, Windows Media Player 11, the version that ships with Windows Vista, is dramatically improved, with support for music, videos, photos, recorded TV shows, streaming Internet media, and more. It really is an all-in-one solution for virtually all of your digital media needs - well, with one major exception: Windows Media Player 11 doesn’t natively support Apple’s dominant iPod, the best-selling portable MP3 player on the planet. In this article, we’ll show you how to get the most of Windows Media Player 11. We’ll even show you how to make it work with the iPod.

Media Player Basics As is the case throughout this article, we assume you’re familiar with basic operations in Windows and its many bundled applications. And Microsoft has included a very simple media player in Windows for over a decade, and a full-featured, all-in-one player since Windows Me. That said, Windows Media Player 11 can be fairly complicated if you don’t understand what it’s doing. So we’ll get started by examining this new Media Player and its core functionality.

Setting Up Windows Media Player 11

The very first time you launch Windows Media Player 11, you’re forced to step through a quick wizard that enables you to configure various privacy options and optionally configure MTV’s URGE, an online music service that we discuss later in this article. Don’t just click Next here. Instead, you will want to very carefully read through the options that Microsoft presents. It’s possible to configure these options after the fact, of course, but it’s better to do so now, as you’ll see in a moment. On the first page of the wizard, you’re asked to choose between Express and Custom set-up choices. Always choose Custom. Express may be quicker, but it doesn’t give you access to the most important Windows Media Player 11 configuration options and instead chooses defaults that benefit Microsoft, not you. After you choose Custom, you’ll be presented with the window shown in article 10-1, which is very similar to the initial dialog box that Windows Media Player 10 users saw on Windows XP.

Here, you pick various privacy options. In the Enhanced Playback Experience section, you will want to weigh the second option very carefully. If you have a finely crafted media library, in which you’ve lovingly downloaded and applied album art for all of your ripped music files, you will definitely want to clear the Update My Music Files by Retrieving Media Information from the Internet check box. If you don’t, you will find that your media library will, over time, become a jumbled mess as Media Player changes your nicely formatted music files to match what a thirdparty library on the Internet says are the correct song, album, and artist names, often with disastrous results. On the other hand, if you’re just starting out and intend to use Windows Media Player 11 to rip your CDs to the PC, leave this option checked. The other options should be pretty self-explanatory and none are as potentially destructive as the option just discussed. You can leave the default options selected as is. When you click Next, you’re presented with a window that is new to Windows Media Player 11, allowing you to place Media Player shortcuts on the desktop and Quick Launch toolbar. If you think those shortcuts will be valuable, check the appropriate boxes and continue. The next window, too, is new to Windows Media Player 11. Here, you can choose to make Windows Media Player 11 the default music player for all of the media types it supports, or you can choose the exact file types that it will play.

Obviously, this phase of setup is aimed at experts, and for the most part you should simply choose the first option, Make Windows Media Player 11 the default music and video player. However, if you have strong feelings about using a different media player for specific file types, you can choose the second option. If you do so, you’ll be presented with a new Windows Vista feature: the Set associations for a program section of Control Pane shown in article 10-2. Here, you can configure which media file types will be associated with Windows Media Player 11. Finally, you will be asked if you’d like to set up the URGE online music service. Select no. You can set up URGE at a later time if you want, and we’ll examine how to do this later in this article if you’re curious. You won’t be prompted to install URGE if your PC is not connected to the Internet.

Understanding the Windows Media Player 11 User Interface

Shown in article 10-3, Windows Media Player 11 is a dramatic departure from previous Windows Media Player versions, with a more visual media library view that relies heavily on album art and photo and video thumbnails. Also, Windows Media Player 11 adopts the Windows Vista look and feel, with glass-like window borders and the new black and blue Vista color scheme.

Windows Media Player 11 ships with a small selection of sample music and video content, which we’ll use for the examples in this part of the article. This lets you get started with the player even if you don’t have any content of your own. Compared to its predecessors, Windows Media Player 11 offers a number of improvements and changes. First, the player no longer uses a hokey, pseudo-rounded window that doesn’t quite work correctly (maximize Windows Media Player 10 in Windows XP to see what we mean by this). Instead, Windows Media Player 11 looks and acts like many other Windows Vista applications. The toolbar has been enhanced with Back and Forward buttons, which enable you to easily move between the Media Player experiences that are listed along the rest of the toolbar: Now Playing, Library (the default view), Rip, Burn, and Sync. Here’s how Back and Forward work. If you’re in the media library, denoted by a highlighted Library toolbar button, and click the Rip toolbar button, you’ll find yourself transported by the Media Player music ripping experience. Now, you can press Back to get back to the previous experience you visited (i.e., the media library). And if you do navigate back to the media library, you can click Forward to go back to Rip again. In short, the Forward and Back buttons work just like their equivalents in Internet Explorer and the Windows shell. You might notice that the Guide button is no longer available in the Media Player toolbar. You can still get to the Media Guide, however. To do so, click the small downward-pointing arrow under the Online Stores button on the far right of the toolbar and choose Media Guide from the resulting drop-down menu. This dropdown menu will appear only if you are online. Speaking of the right side of the toolbar, this area has been cleaned up substantially this time around. In Windows Media Player 10, there were Music, Radio, Video, and Online Stores buttons. Now, there is just an Online Stores button. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll see another new bit of user interface right below the toolbar. Here, there is a breadcrumb bar that helps you navigate through the various media libraries you’ll access in Windows Media Player 11 - Music (the default), Pictures, Video, Recorded TV, and Other Media - buttons for layout and view options, the new Instant Search box, and a button for toggling the player’s List Pane. The next sections discuss what each of these features does.

Category Button and Breadcrumb Bar In Windows Media Player 10 (and 7, 8, and 9 for that matter), Microsoft divided up your media library by media type using an expanding tree view that many users found difficult to use. Regardless of your experience, however, the tree view was simply lousy because it made it too easy to get lost in large media libraries. Windows Media Player 11 does away with this, replacing the tree view with a breadcrumb bar (similar to what is used in the Windows Explorer address bar) that is triggered by the Category button. If you click this button, 10-4, you can choose between the various media types Media Player supports and see only that part of the media library you need. By default, you will be in Music view, since most people use Windows Media Player to play music. You’ll notice that the breadcrumb bar to the right of the Category button lets you dive into your media library in various ways. For example, by default, the music portion of your media library is displaying your content by songs. But you can change this view by clicking on the various nodes in the breadcrumb bar. Say you wanted to view just the albums, and not the individual songs. To do so, click the arrow next to Library in the breadcrumb bar and select Albums. The view will now resemble article 10-5. What you see in the breadcrumb bar will depend on which section of the media library you are viewing. For example, music has options for albums, artists, songs, and genres, whereas video has options for all video, actors, genre, and rating.

Layout Options The Layout Options button enables you to configure various parts of the Windows Media Player 11 user interface. These parts include the Navigation pane, which is the list of information found on the left side of the player (on by default); the List pane, which was a prominent part of the Windows Media Player 10 interface, but is off by default in Windows Media Player 11; and the Classic Menus, which are off by default, as they are in so many Windows Vista applications. Typically, you’re going to want to leave the Navigation pane on. This is a handy place to access the top-most (well, right-most) items in the Media Player breadcrumb bar without having to drop down a menu. The List pane will likely be of interest in two major scenarios. First, if you’re a big fan and user of previous Windows Media Player versions, you’re probably used to the way those media players used temporary and saved playlists as the main way to interact with your music collection, so the List pane might be of interest. But the List pane is useful in other situations. If you’re going to create a saved playlist or burn some songs to an audio CD, for example, the List pane can act as a handy holding area for the tracks you want to include. If you enable Classic Menus, you’ll see a top-mounted menu structure similar to that found in previous Windows Media Player versions. Our advice is still to skip out on Classic Menus, and enjoy the uncluttered simplicity of the Media Player interface.

View Options Like the Layout Options button, the View Options button triggers a pop-out menu, but this one includes just a few options, all of which are related to the way the media library is displayed. There are three options here: Icon, Tile/Expanded Tile (depending on the content being viewed), and Details. In Icon view, the media library displays each item as an icon. Albums appear as they do in a real music store, with album art. Artists and other groups appear as stacks, 10-7, when there is more than one contained item. So, for example, if you have two more albums by Collective Soul ripped to your hard drive, the Collective Soul icon will display as a stack, not a standard square icon. Stacks are cool because they are immediately obvious. They look just like a stack of paper on your desk or, in this case, like a stack of CD cases. You’ll see a lot of stacks in both the Genre and Year views in the Music portion of the media library. In Tile view, items display in a manner similar to the Tiles view in Windows Explorer. (Why there is a name discrepancy is beyond us.) That is, you will see an icon for each item - album art in the case of music - and related textual information to the right. Each item is considered a tile consisting of an icon and its related information. In some views, like Songs view in Music, Tile is replaced by Expanded Tile, which provides even more related textual information (a list of songs, in this case). Tile view is nice if you have lots of screen real estate and think you might occasionally want to edit song ratings, which is one of the bits of related info displayed on each tile. In Details view, the media library behaves like it did in previous Windows Media Player versions (and, as it turns out, as it does in Apple’s popular iTunes program): as a textual list of information only. This interface, which seems to be modeled after 20-year-old MSDOS database applications like dBASE III+, is utilitarian, but it also performs a lot faster than the more visual Icon and Tile/Expanded Tile views. So if you have a slower computer, or a massive music collection, this might actually be your best bet from a performance perspective. Depending on what you’re viewing, some view styles will not be available. For example, in the Songs view in Music, you can only choose Extended Tiles view and not Icon or Details.

Instant Search In keeping with one of the biggest selling points of Windows Vista, Windows Media Player 11 includes an Instant Search box so that you can quickly find the content you want. Annoyingly, the search box in Windows Media Player 11 is instant: As you type in the name of an artist, album, song, or other media information, the media library view is filtered in real time. In other words, it doesn’t wait for you to press Enter; it searches as you type. Instant Search is context sensitive. If the media library is currently viewing Songs in Music, it will search for songs that match your search query. But if you’re viewing artists, it will search artist names instead. If you aren’t interested in Media Player trying to outthink you, however, you can apply your search to other criteria - like the entire library - by clicking the drop-down arrow to the right of the Instant Search box and picking the option you want

List Pane To the right of the Instant Search box is a small right-pointing arrow that enables you to toggle the List pane, described previously. When the List pane is active, the arrow is still there, so you can turn it off again easily.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Media Player Navigation If you’re a keyboard jockey, you’ll appreciate the fact that Windows Media Player includes a wealth of keyboard shortcuts related to navigating around the Media Player user interface.

Playing Music and Other Media As with previous Windows Media Player versions, you can easily select and play music in the media library. But the range of options you have for doing so has increased in this version, and Microsoft has finally put some often-needed playback options, like Shuffle and Repeat, right up front where they belong. To play a single song in Media Player, simply double-click the item. It will begin playing immediately. To play a complete album, double-click the album’s album art. Simple, right? Most items work this way in the media library. There are, of course, exceptions. You can’t play a stack of items by double-clicking it, for example. Instead, doing so simply opens the stack and displays the items it contains. If you want to play a stack, right-click it and choose Play. In the bottom of the Media Player interface, you’ll see the new universal media playback control, which is centered in the application window and provides simple access to the most often-needed playback features. These are, from left to right, Shuffle, Repeat, Stop, Previous, Play/Pause, Next, Mute, and a volume slider. The use of these controls should be obvious, but what might not be obvious is how you trigger these features, plus other playback controls, using the keyboard.