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Player Windows Media Player (or WMP) sucks you in from the moment you start it. As Windows XP’s built-in boom box, it plays CDs, of course, but it also lets you play, organize, and generally enjoy any kind of music stored on your computer, whether the tunes came from CDs, the Internet, or your buddy down the hall. It also plays video and lets you tune into the nascent Internet radio market. If you have a CD writer, Windows Media Player creates CDs that contain any combination of tracks you want. If you have a digital audio player, WMP copies music to the player, so that you can hip and/or hop, as circumstances dictate, wherever you go. Windows Media Player is useful to you only if your computer has a sound card and a headphone or a set of speakers. The little speaker inside the box that goes “beep” when you start the computer won’t cut the mustard. If your computer doesn’t have sound hardware, you have to get some or forget about using Windows Media Player. Starting with the Media Guide To start Windows Media Player, choose Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Entertainment -> Windows Media Player. (If you have run WMP recently, it’s in the Start menu’s short list, and you can much more easily choose Start -> Windows Media Player.) Click the Media Guide button on the left side of the WMP window. The Media Guide hooks into www.WindowsMedia.com, which is owned and operated by you guessed it a little company in Redmond, Washington that also makes PC operating systems. The www.WindowsMedia.com site features clips from new music and videos, entertainment news, and other information that may interest users of WMP. Many of the pages have links that allow you to buy the products described.

Playing with Now Playing

The first control button on the left edge of WMP is named Now Playing. When you click it, WMP displays the Media Playlist. The right side of the window displays a playlist, which is just a sequence of tracks. The left side displays details of the first track. When the track is playing, the area below the details shows either a picture of the album cover or a psychedelic visualization of the music. To select a different playlist, choose one from the drop-down list of playlist names. When you do, WMP behaves just as a CD player does when you put in a CD: It starts playing the first track, then it plays the second one, and so on until it reaches the end. To select a different track from the current playlist, double-click the track down in the list of playlist contents. The buttons along the bottom of the window control Now Playing. They work similarly to the buttons on a conventional CD player. Playing a CD Want to play a CD? That’s hard, too. Here’s how:

1. Take the CD out of its plastic case, if it’s in one.

2. Wipe the pizza stains off the shiny side (don’t worry about the other side).

3. Stick the CD in the PC’s drive and close it. If WMP isn’t running already, it starts all by itself. Then you wait a few seconds (well, quite a few seconds, especially if you’re afflicted with a slow Internet connection), and WMP starts playing the first track. To WMP, the CD is a playlist. The tracks on the CD appear in the playlist area on the right side of the window. Look at the drop-down list of playlists in the upper-right corner of the window; the name of the CD appears as the selected item. Changing the graphic area The three buttons below the graphic area, er, visualizations screen, change its contents:

 -  Click the first button to display a list of options. The first option is Album Art. The others are different groups of abstract visualizations of the music.  

-  Click the second button to cycle through the selected group of visualizations backward.

 -  Click the third button to cycle through it forward. (These buttons disappear when you select Album Art. You only get one Album Art per album.) Changing the size of the window In its initial form, WMP occupies a substantial chunk of real estate on the Desktop. To make it smaller, drag a corner of the window to the desired location, as you do with any other window. But note that when the menu bar is not visible, the only corner you can drag is the lower-right one. When you make the window small, the window may not have enough room for all of the buttons that run down the left side. Use the double arrows above and below the buttons to scroll them so that you can reach them all.

Copying from a CD Click the Copy From CD button on the left edge of the WMP screen to copy tracks from a CD to your computer. If the CD is already in your PC when you click Copy From CD, WMP simply presents a list of tracks. If you select Copy From CD first and then insert the CD, WMP automatically starts playing the first track. Click the Stop button at the bottom of the window to make it stop or, if you remember, hold down the Shift key when Windows starts reading the CD. The Shift key tells Windows “don’t try to run this CD, or play these songs; I just want to look at what’s on the stupid CD.” See the column of check boxes down the left side of the track list? They indicate which tracks are selected for copying to your computer.

 -  To copy all of the tracks, just leave the check boxes alone.  

-  To exclude a few tracks, clear those tracks’ check boxes.

 -  To copy only a few tracks, clear the check box at the top of the column, level with the column titles. This clears the whole track list. Now select the check boxes for the tracks that you want to copy. Copying a track takes a significant fraction of the track’s play time. Select just a few tracks so that you can see how the copying process works, without having to wait all day. When you’ve chosen the tracks that you want to transfer to your PC, click the Copy Music button. (It’s above the playlist, roughly in the middle of the screen.) Watch the track list’s Copy Status column; it shows your computer’s progress as it copies the selected tracks. Where can you find the copied music in your computer? In a playlist, of course. WMP creates a new playlist with the same name as the album and puts the copied tracks in it. If you switch to Now Playing and look at the playlist drop-down list, you see the CD’s title with a playlist icon next to it. That’s where your copied tracks live.

The music itself is stored in the My Music folder.

WMP makes a folder for each artist, and inside the artist’s folder, it makes a sub-folder for each album. The music tracks go into the album’s folder. If you use the Copy From CD command, WMP stores all the associated information track titles, album cover art, artist along with the music. That’s handy because WMP can pick up the info from the files and folders when it needs to, without having to run to www.WindowsMedia.com. Organizing Your Media Library WMP uses the Media Library to organize sound tracks. When you understand how the Media Library works, you’ll be able to organize your music just the way you want. WMP constructs the Media Library on the fly, using all the entries in your My Music folder and the shared My Music folder for the PC, if one exists. Leafing through the Media Library Click the Media Library button to display the Media Library. WMP displays a window split into left and right panes, with the Media Library’s structure on the left and the contents of the selected item on the right.

The Media Library is organized into folders, just like the Windows XP file system. Unlike the file system, the Media Library has a fixed set of folders:

 -  Audio: Contains audio tracks, such as those you have copied from CDs.

• All Audio: Contains all of the sound tracks in the Media Library.

• Album: Contains all of the albums in the Media Library. An album is “in” the Media Library if you have copied at least one track from that album with the Copy from CD operation. Click the plus sign next to Album to expand Album into a list of albums. Click an album to display that album’s tracks in the right pane.

• Artist: Contains all of the artists known to have tracks in the Media Library. Click the plus sign next to Artist to display a list of artists under the Artist folder. Select an artist to display tracks known to be by that artist.

• Genre: This item works just like Artist, except that it organizes tracks by genre (rock, classical, and so on) instead of by artist.

 -  Video: Video recordings, discussed in Article I, Article 12.

• All Clips: Contains all of the video clips in the Media Library.

• Author: Contains authors who have video clips in the Media Library. This item works just like the Artist subfolder in the Audio folder: You can expand the item into a list of authors by clicking the plus sign, and you can select an author to display a list of that author’s video clips.

 -  My Playlists: Playlists that you create or that come with Windows XP. Click the plus sign to expand the item into a list of playlists, and select a playlist to see the audio tracks or video clips it contains.

 -  Radio Tuner Presets: Lists streaming audio providers on the Web that you have stored as presets (see “Radio Tuner,” later in this article).

 -  Deleted Items: Items you have deleted from the other folders. Deleted Items serves the same function that the Recycle Bin does for files: It lets you restore a deleted item if you change your mind. Finding the tracks you want The Media Library folders are powerful tools for keeping your recordings organized because they offer so many different ways of looking at the same information. Want to know what albums contain recordings by a given artist? That artist’s entry in the Artist folder tells you. Want to look at one of those albums to see what else is on it? The album’s entry in the Album folder tells you. Sorting You can sort a list in the right pane by the contents of any column. For example, click the All Audio folder to display a list of all of your audio tracks. Now click the heading of the Artist column to sort the list of tracks by artist. Click the heading of the Album column to sort the list by album. Click a heading twice in a row to sort the list backwards on that column. If your collection of recordings is large, sorting the list in different ways can help you find items you want.

You can search the Media Library for items that have certain words in their titles or for artist names, album names, or genres. When your collection of recordings becomes too large to inspect easily, this is a convenient way to find things in it. To search the Media Library, click the Search button, located just above the panes of the window. WMP displays the Search Media Library dialog box. Enter a word that appears in at least one track title, artist name, or album name in the Media Library. Click the Search button. WMP searches the library and displays a larger version of the same dialog box.

Click the View Results button to close the Search Media Library dialog box. Notice that a new playlist is named Search Results; it’s selected, and it contains, logically enough, the tracks that were found in the search. The Search Results playlist is just like any other playlist, except that the contents of the list the matching tracks are changed every time a search is run. You can keep a Search Results playlist around for a long time. Playing tracks in the Media Library You can play a track directly from the Media Library. Just select the track and click the Start button at the bottom of the WMP window. You can even play a group of tracks by selecting the group. To play all of the songs by a given artist, for example, select that artist under the Artist folder and click Start. Managing playlists Er, maybe that should be mangling playlists. WMP gives you all sorts of control over which songs you hear, and it does so through playlists. Did you ever want to rearrange the order of the songs on the Beatles’ White Album? My son just about croaked when he found out he could burn a CD that plays Oops... I Did It Again immediately after Eminem’s homage Oops... The Real Slim Shady Did It Again. You’ve got the power. Hmmm. That’s a catchy tag line, isn’t it? Media Library lets you create your own playlists, and you can modify them to your heart’s content. Creating a new playlist If you have a favorite set of tracks that you like to hear in a particular order, and the tracks are in the Media Library, you can build a playlist that gives you precisely what you want. It’s like being able to create your own custom CD. In fact, you can use a playlist to make your own custom CD. Nothing to it. The section “Copy to CD or Device” explains how. To make your own playlist, click the New Playlist button on the left side of the Media Library window. WMP opens a dialog box that prompts you to name the new playlist. Enter a name for the list and click OK. If you look at the drop-down list of playlist names above the right pane of the window, your new playlist is there. That’s how hard it is to create a new playlist.