The top edge, as you may have noticed, now offers six primary tabs, which cover the essential functions of Media Player. They’re described in more detail in the following pages, but here’s a quick overview:

For its first trick, Media Player can simulate a $25 CD player, capable of playing your music CDs while you’re working at your computer. To fire it up, just insert an audio CD into your computer’s CD or DVD drive.

Unless you’ve fiddled with the settings, Media Player opens automatically and the CD begins to play. The screen even fills with a shimmering, laser-light show (called a visualization) that pulses along with the music. Ta-da!

(If Windows instead asks what you want to do with the CD, see Figure 7-7.)

And if you have more than one CD drive with a disc in it (or, say, one audio CD and one DVD), you can tell Media Player which disc you want to play by choosing from the little down-arrow menu next to the Now Playing tab.

Figure 7-7. Top: Windows may ask what you want it to do with a music CD. If you accept the Play Audio CD using Windows Media Player option by clicking OK or pressing Enter, Windows Media Player opens automatically and begins to play the songs on your CD. Bottom: This illustration identifies the functions of some of the less obvious controls. For example, whenever the Media Player window isn’t maximized, the main menu bar is hidden. You can summon it—vertically instead of horizontally—by clicking the triangle identified here. Or you can return it to its rightful place by pressing Ctrl+M. Or, no matter what your window situation, you can right-click the tabs or the title bar to produce a pop-up version of the menu bar. If you don’t see the list of tracks at the right side of the window, click the Hide/Show Playlist button.

Fun with Media Player

When your everyday work leaves you uninspired, here are a few of the experiments you can conduct on the Media Player screen design:

• Switch visualizations. To try a different visualization, click the Next Visualization or the Previous Visualization arrow (the tiny arrow buttons just below the Now Playing tab), or press Tab+Enter and then click the Video Settings button, or choose View→Visualizations. And if you tire of the displays built into Windows, then just download more of them from the Internet by choosing Tools→Download→ Visualizations.

Tip

One of the most interesting choices is Album Art, which displays a picture of the album cover for whichever song is now playing.

• Shrink the window to show some skin. If the Media Player window is taking up too much screen space, making it harder for you to work on that crucial business plan as you listen to *NSync, press Ctrl+2 to shrink the window, or choose View→Skin Mode (seeFigure 7-8). Press Ctrl+1 to return the Media Player window to its full-sized glory. (Of course, you can also just minimize Media Player, as you would any window.)

• Expand the window. On the other hand, if your PC is briefly serving as a glorified stereo system at a cocktail party, choose View→Full Screen (or press Alt+Enter).

UP TO SPEEDWhich Disks Play Automatically?

As shown in Figure 7-7, inserting a music CD into a brand new Windows XP computer inspires Windows to ask what you want to do with it—play it, show you its contents, or do nothing. Similar choices appear when you insert a DVD, a CD containing pictures, a CD containing files, a blank CD, and so on.

If you’d rather avoid this questionnaire dialog box whenever you insert a disc, then visit the AutoPlay control center and make your selections all at once. Start by choosing Start→My Computer. In the My Computer window, right-click your CD drive’s icon. From the shortcut menu, choose Properties. In the resulting dialog box, click the AutoPlay tab shown here.

From the drop-down list at the top of the box, choose the kind of disc you want to affect. Choose “Music files” (a CD filled with MP3 files), “Music CD” (standard audio CDs), “DVD Movie,” or whatever.

Then click one of the icons in the Actions list. Apart from Play, the most useful options here are “Open folder to view files” (the CD or DVD’s contents window will simply open when you insert it) or “Take no action” (nothing will happen when you insert this kind of disk). The factory setting is, of course, “Prompt me each time to choose an action,” which produces the dialog box that began this whole adventure, shown in Figure 7-7.

The screen-saver effect now fills the entire screen, hiding all text, buttons, and controls. If you have an available coffee table and a laptop to put it on, you’ve got yourself a great atmospheric effect. (When the party’s over, just click the mouse, or press Alt+Enter again, to make the standard controls reappear.)

• Change the skin. In hopes of riding the world’s craze for MP3 files, Microsoft has helped itself to one of WinAmp’s most interesting features: skins. (Definitions: (An MP3 file [MPEG Audio Layer-3] is a compact, downloadable, CD-quality sound file format. WinAmp is a popular MP3-playing program. And a skin is a design scheme that completely changes the look of Windows Media Player, as shown in see Figure 7-9.)

Figure 7-8. At full size, the Media Player window occupies a large chunk of your screen (Figure 7-7). In Skin Mode (shown here), it takes up less space on your screen and can use any of dozens of radical new design schemes. It can show both visualizations (when you’re playing music) and video (when you’re playing—well, you know). To return to the full-size window and its full-size complement of controls, press Ctrl+1, or hunt through the various buttons on your skin until you find the Return to Full Mode button.

Figure 7-9. Not all skins are, shall we say, masterpieces of intuitive design; in fact, it may take you several minutes just to find the Stop button. When you find a skin you like, click Apply Skin (above the list). If you don’t like any of the designs or just want to keep looking, click More Skins. Windows sends you to the Internet for a visit to Microsoft’s grisly-sounding Skin Gallery. If nothing there strikes your fancy, either search the Web or check back later, as Microsoft expands the collection periodically.

To choose a new skin, choose View→Skin Chooser. Then click each of the available skins, listed down the left side, to see a preview of its appearance. When you click the Apply Skin button (at the top-left corner of the window), your player takes on the look of the skin you chose and shrinks down into the compact Skin mode, as described in the previous tip

• Fool around with the playback sequence. You can make the songs on the CD play back in a random order, just as though you’d pushed the Shuffle button on a CD player. To do this, just click the Shuffle button (identified in Figure 7-7.) or press Ctrl+H—the shortcut for the Play→Shuffle command. And if you love a particular CD so much that you’d like to hear it over and over again (instead of stopping at the end), press Ctrl+T—the shortcut for Play→Repeat.

Tip

These tricks work for whatever playlist you’ve currently selected—not just an audio CD. (Playlists are described later in this chapter.)

• Fool around with the sound. Don’t miss the graphic equalizer, a little row of sliders that lets you adjust the bass, treble, and other frequencies to suit your particular speakers and your particular ears. In version 10, Microsoft made it pretty hard to get to—View→Enhancements→Graphic Equalizer—but it’s there. (The same submenu offers something called SRS WOW, which simulates a 3-D sound experience through nothing more than stereo speakers or headphones.)

• Read the “CD booklet.” If you click the Rip tab and then click Find Album Info, Media Player goes online to retrieve a useful display of information from the CD you’re listening to. You’re shown song titles, track links, singer names, and miscellaneous album information that even includes a little review and, needless to say, an opportunity to buy another copy of the CD online.

You can copy an album, or selected tracks, to your hard drive in the form of stand-alone music files that play when double-clicked (a process called ripping, much to the consternation of sleepless record executives who think that it’s short for ripping off). Having CD songs on your hard drive is handy because:

If you’re sold on the idea, begin with a quick trip to the Tools→Options menu. Click the Rip Music tab, and then inspect your settings. For example, if you intervene by clicking the Change button near the top, Windows will copy your song files into the My Documents→My Music folder.

Note, too, that Microsoft has designed Windows Media Player to generate files in the company’s own proprietary format, something called Windows Media Audio (WMA) format (.wma). But many people prefer, and even require, MP3 files. For example, most recent CD players and portable music players (including the iPod) can play back MP3 files—but won’t know what to do with WMA files.

If you’d prefer the more universally compatible MP3 files, use the Format pop-up menu to choose “mp3” (see Figure 7-10). And rejoice: Until Media Player 10 came along, you had to pay $10 extra for the ability to create MP3 files.

Figure 7-10. Music files occupy a lot of space on the hard drive. By adjusting this slider, you can specify how much Windows compresses the song files, with the understanding that you sacrifice sound quality as you make the file smaller. Experiment with the other settings to accommodate your ears and speakers. (If you’ve selected the Windows Media format, try the Variable option. It maximizes audio quality and minimizes file size by continuously adjusting the data rate along the song’s length, as needed.)

Finally, the slider in this dialog box lets you control the tradeoff, in the resulting sound files, between audio quality and file size. At 128 kbps, for example, a three-minute MP3 file might consume about 2.8 megabytes. At 192 kbps, the same file will sound much better, but it will eat up about 4.2 MB. And at a full 320 kbps, the file will be roughly 7 MB.

These are important considerations if you’re ripping for a portable MP3 player, like the iPod. For instance: if your music player contains a 20 GB hard drive, it can hold 142 hours of music you’ve ripped at 320 kbps, or 357 hours at 128 kbps.

For MP3 files, most people find the 192 Kbps setting (on the “Audio quality” slider) to produce great-sounding, relatively compact files. For WMA, 128 Kbps might be a good starting point. Needless to say, let your ears (and the capacity of your portable music player) be your guide.

Click OK, then begin:

Every CD transferred to your hard drive winds up with an entry in your Library menu, identified in Figure 7-7. Make that several entries, actually, as this Explorer-like tree view lets you see your collection sorted by composer, album, year released, or whatever. Whenever you want to play back some music, just double-click its name in this list—there’s no need to hunt around in your shoeboxes for the original CD the songs came from.

But that’s just the beginning of Media Player’s organizational tools; see Figure 7-11. Transferring CD songs to your hard drive isn’t the only way to log your files in the Media Player database. You can also add sound and video files to this master list using any of these methods:

Figure 7-11. Navigate your library (left and middle panels). Drag each song or CD name into the New Playlist list (right panel).

Once you’ve created a well-stocked fridge of music, you can call up a particular song by typing into the Search box (at the top of the Library list), by navigating the folder tree (at the left side of the Media Library list), or by using the playlist list (in the My Playlists category of the Library list).

The beauty of a CD burner is that it finally frees you from the stifling restrictions put on your musical tastes by the record companies. You can create your own “best of” CDs that play in any CD player—and that contain only your favorite songs in your favorite order.

See Figure 7-12 for instructions.

Figure 7-12. Top: The easiest way to create a CD in Media Player is to assemble the songs you want in a custom playlist, as described in the previous section. Choose the playlist’s name from the Burn List drop-down menu. If you haven’t already built a playlist, you can assemble a one-time list by clicking the Edit Playlist link. Bottom: The resulting window lets you hand-pick songs from your library. Use the “View library by” drop-down list to choose how you’d like to see your library listed: by genre, album, TV show, and so on. Once you’ve assembled the audio CD-to-be, insert a blank CD into your burner, and click the Start Burn link just above the list of songs. The transfer process takes quite a bit of time and quite a bit of hard drive space, so budget appropriately for both. When the process is complete, your PC spits out the CD automatically.

If you have a pocket gizmo that’s capable of playing music (like a Diamond Rio or a Pocket PC) or even videos (like a Portable Media Center), the process for loading your favorite material onto it is very similar to burning your own CD. The only difference in the procedure is that you do your work on the Sync tab instead of the Burn tab. But you choose a playlist to transfer (or hand-pick material) in exactly the same way.

The beauty of a Portable Media Center gadget, in fact, is that Media Player can keep it synced. As your library grows, shrinks, or gets edited, you can sleep soundly, knowing that your portable gadget’s contents will be updated automatically the next time you hook it up to your PC’s USB port.

The 2000s’ twist on listening to the radio as you work is listening without a radio. Nowadays, the computer itself is used as a radio, one that can tune in to hundreds of radio stations all over the world, each brought to you by the Internet.

Unfortunately, Microsoft opted to axe the radio feature from Media Player 10; it can no longer tune in Internet stations—at least, not for free. If you want to listen to radio from within Media Player, you’re expected to sign up for a paid subscription from one of the online music stores described earlier. (Of course, you can find hundreds of free radio stations on the Web.)

If your PC has a drive that’s capable of playing DVDs and a piece of software called a DVD decoder, you’re in for a treat. Media Player can play rented or purchased Hollywood movies on DVD as though it was born to do so—a new feature in Windows XP.

Watching movies on your screen couldn’t be simpler: Just insert the DVD. Windows XP automatically detects that it’s a video DVD—as opposed to, say, one that’s just filled with files. Then, depending on the settings you made in the dialog box shown in Figure 7-7., it either opens Media Player automatically, opens your add-on DVD-playing software, or gives you the choice. (If not, no problem: Open Media Player yourself and then choose Play→DVD, VCD or CD Audio→[your DVD drive’s name].)

Media Player starts out playing your movie in a relatively small window. But you didn’t come this far, and pay this much, just to watch movies on a mere slice of your screen.

Your first act, therefore, should be to enlarge the picture to fill the screen. Pressing Alt+Enter is the easiest way, but you can also choose View→Full Screen or click the Full Screen button (see Figure 7-13).

Figure 7-13. Once the DVD is playing, you control the playback using the standard Media Player controls (at the bottom-left edge of the window). To switch to a different “chapter,” use the list at right (click the little Show Playlist button if you don’t see it). To change language or parental-control options, choose Tools→Options and click the DVD tab. When you’re playing the movie full screen, the playback controls reappear when you move the mouse a bit.

After you enlarge the screen, playback controls appear for a few seconds at the lower-left corner of the screen, permitting you to speed backward or forward through the movie, and then fade away so as not to obscure Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face. To pause the movie, jump around in it, or advance one frame at a time, just twitch the mouse to make the controls (and the playlist of DVD chapters) reappear.

Alternatively, you can right-click anywhere on the “movie screen” itself to reveal a menu of disc-navigation features.