Windows Vista : Working with Digital Media - Tips for Working with Windows Media Player

Playing Media Files

Windows Vista gives you many indirect ways to play media files via Windows Media Player. Here’s a summary:

• Open Windows Explorer, find the media file you want to play, and then double-click the file.

  Note

  To control the media file types that are associated with Windows Media Player, select Start, Default Programs. In the Default Programs window, click Set Your Default Programs, click Windows Media Player, and then click Choose Defaults for this Program. Activate the check boxes for the file types that you want to open automatically in Windows Media Player. If you don’t want Windows Media Player to handle a particular file type, deactivate its check box.

  
  

• Insert an audio CD in your CD or DVD drive, or insert a DVD disc in your DVD drive.

• If you have a memory card reader, insert a memory card (such as a CompactFlash card or a MultiMedia Card). If Windows Vista asks what you want to do with this disk, select Play Using Windows Media Player. If you don’t want to be bothered with this dialog box each time, activate the Always Do the Selected Action check box. Click OK.

• Download media from the Internet.

• You can also open files directly from Media Player by pressing Alt, pulling down the File menu, and selecting either Open (to launch a media file from your computer or from a network location) or Open URL (to launch a media file from the Internet).

Setting Windows Media Player’s Playback Options

Windows Media Player comes with several options that you can work with to control various aspects of the playback. To see these options, press Alt and then select Tools, Options. The Player tab, shown in Figure 1, contains the following settings:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\PlayerUpgrade

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\WindowsMediaPlayer

Copying Music from an Audio CD

Windows Media Player comes with the welcome capability to copy (rip in the vernacular) tracks from an audio CD to your computer’s hard disk. Although this process is straightforward, as you’ll see, there are several options that you need to take into account before you start copying. These options include the location of the folder in which the ripped tracks will be stored, the structure of the track filenames, the file format to use, and the quality (bit rate) at which you want to copy the tracks. You control all these settings in the Rip Music tab of the Options dialog box (press Alt and then select Tools, Options to get there).

Selecting a Location and Filename Structure

The Rip Music to This Location group displays the name of the folder that will be used to store the copied tracks. By default, this location is %USERPROFILE%\Music. To specify a different folder (for example, a folder on a partition with lots of free space), click Change and use the Browse for Folder dialog box to choose the new folder.

The default filenames that Windows Media Player generates for each copied track use the following structure:

								Track_Number Song_Title.ext
							

Here, Track_Number is the song’s track number on the CD, Song_Title is the name of the song, and ext is the extension used by the recording format (such as WMA or MP3). Windows Media Player can also include additional data in the filename such as the artist name, the album name, the music genre, and the recording bit rate. To control which of these details the name incorporates, click the File Name button in the Rip Music tab to display the File Name Options dialog box, shown in Figure 2. Activate the check boxes beside the details you want in the filenames, and use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to determine the order of the details. Finally, use the Separator list to choose which character to use to separate each detail.

Figure 2. Use the File Name Options dialog box to specify the details you want in the filename assigned to each copied audio CD track.

Choosing the Recording File Format

Prior to version 10, Windows Media Player supported only a single file format: WMA (Windows Media Audio). This is an excellent music format that provides good quality recordings at high compression rates. If you plan to listen to the tracks only on your computer or on a custom CD, the WMA format is all you need. However, if you have an MP3 player or other device that may not recognize WMA files (although most do, unless you’re one of the millions with an iPod), you need to use the MP3 recording format. Windows Media Player 10 provided MP3 encoding support right out of the box, and now Media Player 11 supports

• Windows Media Audio (WMA)— This is Windows Media Player’s default audio file format. WMA compresses digital audio by removing extraneous sounds that are not normally detected by the human ear. This results in high-quality audio files that are a fraction of the size of uncompressed audio.

• Windows Media Audio Pro (WMA Pro)— This version of WMA can create music files that are smaller than regular WMA and so are easier to play on mobile devices that don’t have much room.

• Windows Media Audio (variable bit rate)— This version of WMA is a bit “smarter” in that it changes the amount of compression depending on the audio data: if the data is more complex, it uses less compression to keep the sound quality high; if the data is less complex, it cranks up the compression.

• Windows Media Audio Lossless— This version of WMA doesn’t compress the audio tracks at all. This gives you the highest possible audio quality, but it takes up much more space (up to about 400MB per CD).

• MP3— This is a popular format on the Internet. Like WMA, MP3 compresses the audio files to make them smaller without sacrificing quality. MP3 files are generally about twice the size of WMA files, but more digital audio players support MP3 (although not many more, these days).

• WAV— This is an uncompressed audio file format that is compatible with all versions of Windows, even going back to Windows 3.0.

Use the Format list in the Rip Music tab to choose the encoder you want to use. Note that if you select any Windows Media Audio format, the Copy Protect Music check box becomes enabled. Here’s how this check box effects your copying:

• If Copy Protect Music is activated, Media Player applies a license to each track that prevents you from copying the track to another computer or to any portable device that is SDMI-compliant (SDMI is the Secure Digital Music Initiative; see www.sdmi.org for more information). Note, however, that you are allowed to copy the track to a writeable CD.

• If Copy Protect Music is deactivated, there are no restrictions on where or how you can copy the track. As long as you’re copying tracks for personal use, deactivating this check box is the most convenient route to take.

Specifying the Quality of the Recording

The tracks on an audio CD use the CD Audio Track file format (.cda extension), which represents the raw (uncompressed) audio data. You can’t work with these files directly because the CDA format isn’t supported by Windows Vista and because these files tend to be huge (usually double-digit megabytes, depending on the track). Instead, the tracks need to be converted into a Windows Vista–supported format (such as WMA). This conversion always involves compressing the tracks to a more manageable size. However, because the compression process operates by removing extraneous data from the file (that is, it’s a lossy compression), there’s a tradeoff between file size and music quality. That is, the higher the compression, the smaller the resulting file, but the poorer the sound quality. Conversely, the lower the compression, the larger the file, but the better the sound quality. Generally, how you handle this tradeoff depends on how much hard disk space you have to store the files and how sensitive your ear is to sound quality.

The recording quality is usually measured in kilobits per second (Kbps; this is called the bit rate), with higher values producer better quality and larger files, as shown in Table 1. To specify the recording quality, use the Audio Quality slider in the Rip Music tab. Move the slider to the right for higher quality recordings, and to the left for lower quality.

Copying Tracks from an Audio CD

After you’ve made your recording choices, you’re ready to start ripping tracks. Here are the steps to follow:

Copying Tracks to a Recordable CD or Device

Windows Media Player can also perform the opposite task: copying media files from your computer to a recordable CD or portable device.

Creating a Playlist

Most people find recording is easiest if it’s done from a playlist, a customized collection of music files. Here’s how to create a new playlist:

After your playlist has been created, you can edit the list by highlighting it in the Library’s Playlists branch and then right-clicking the tracks.

Recording to a CD or Device

Here are the steps to follow to burn music files to a recordable CD or portable device: