Configuring Windows Media Player to Use the Right Audio Format

by Lucas4u | 8:53 PM in , , , , | comments (0)

To configure Windows Media Player 11 for CD ripping, open the Rip menu by click-ing the small arrow under the Rip toolbar button and then choose More Options. This displays the Media Player Options dialog box with the Rip tab opened.

There are a number of options here, but I am 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. I 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 froma technical standpoint than competing options such as MP3 or Advanced AudioCoding (AAC), the format Apple uses for its own music. But because WMA is notsupported on some of the most popular music devices on the planet (read: the iPod),I advise against storing your entire collection in a format that could be a dead endin a few years.

So what do we recommend? We recommend the MP3 format, which is a de factoaudio standard that is supported by every single audio application, device, and PC onthe planet. Yes, MP3 is technically not as advanced as WMA, or even AAC for that mat-ter. But that's okay. Thanks to today's massive hard drive sizes, you can simply encodemusic at a high bit rate. The higher the bit rate, the better the quality. (And, not coinci-dentally, the bigger the resulting file sizes. But again, who cares? Storage is cheap.)

Enjoy Your Media Player Again by Uninstalling Windows Media Player 10

by Lucas4u | 10:35 PM in , | comments (0)

Windows Media Player 10 has been full of bugs from Microsoft since they offered it as a download from their site. Windows Media Player 9 was nice and simple. Windows Media Player 10 is way too complex and feature-rich that it has taken away from the simpleness of version 9 and ruined itself. Another great media player is Winamp but we won't go into that right now.

If you have installed Windows Media Player 10, you can roll back to the version of the Player that was on your computer before installing Windows Media Player 10.

To roll back from Windows Media Player 10 to a previous version, do the following:

1. In Control Panel (Category View), click Add or Remove Programs.
2. Click Remove a program.

Now do one of the following: If you are running Windows XP Service Pack 2, select the Show updates check box (at the top of the list), click Windows Media Player 10 (in the Windows Updates section), and then click Change/Remove.

If you are running Windows XP Service Pack 1 or earlier, click Windows Media Player 10, and then click Change/Remove.

As of writing this many people have found bugs in WMP10 that make it unavailble for common audio and video files. If you find that WMP10 is crashing or giving you errors and you cant play your media files. Uninstall it with these directions and stay happy.

Do U Know How to Add Media Files to Windows Media Player 11 ?

by Lucas4u | 10:32 PM in , | comments (0)

Windows Media Player 11 is the new and easy to use Media Player from Microsoft. Windows Media Player may automatically add files and folders but it tends to do these from the default folders such as 'My Music' and 'My Videos'. You may however have files stored in other areas you may wish to add to the Library. If you wish to make this an automated process alongside the defaults you must go to File>Add to Library or if you wish to you a shortcut simply press the F3 key.

Then select which media folders you wish to add, these will then automatically be monitored, anything added to them will be automatically put into your Windows Media Library. You may see an option about files previously deleted from the library, you may need to click that as you delete files that you don't want Windows Media Player may automatically add these. If you wish to add individual files to the library you can simply locate it from a window with it open and drag it into the library and it will appear with the correct ID3 Tag.

You can now enjoy these files by double clicking on them or pressing the enter key. You will find performance of Windows Media slightly slow whilst it locates more files to add to the library, once it has done this it will play music more smoothly without any interruptions.

Fascinating Features of Windows Media Player 11

by Lucas4u | 1:50 AM in , | comments (0)

Windows Media Player 11 is the most recent version of the player, which is available for Windows XP as well as Windows Vista.

This new version has many new features which are as follows:-

Stacking - Stacking allows graphical representations of how many albums there are in a specific category or folder. The more items there are, the larger the pile or stack is.

Word Wheel - Searches and displays results as characters are being entered, without waiting for Enter key to be hit. Results are refined based on further characters that are typed.

CD Burning - CD Burning now shows a graphical bar showing how much space will be used on the disc.

URGE - The new music store from Microsoft and MTV networks is integrated with the player.

Global Status - Global status shows a broad overview of what the player is doing. The information presented includes status information regarding buffering, ripping, burning and synchronization.

Improved synchronization - Improved synchronization features for loading content onto PlaysForSure-compatible portable players. WMP 11 supports reverse-synchronization, by which media present on the portable device can be replicated back to the PC.

Support CDs - Support for ripping audio CDs to WAV format.

Media Sharing - Media Sharing (via Windows Media Connect) allows content (Music, Pictures, Video) to be streamed to and from Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) AV enabled devices such as the PS3, Xbox 360, and Roku SoundBridge. This includes DRM protected PlaysForSure content. WMP 11 on Windows Vista can also connect to remote media libraries using this feature; this is not available on the Windows XP version.

Integrated Web-browsing - Integrated web-browsing support to browse online music stores.

Disc Spanning - Disc spanning splits a burn list onto multiple discs in case the content does not fit on one disc.

Do U Know How To Copy CDs with Windows Media Player 11?

by Lucas4u | 2:11 AM in , | comments (0)

Windows Media Player 11 which is the latest version available from Microsoft. By using this version you can copy the music off of your audio CDs and onto your computer's hard drive and you can enjoy your music without needing to pop in a disc. Windows Media Player 11 automatically downloads CD information and cover album art so you can more easily identify tracks and surch.

Here are few steps to get the most out of Window Media Player 11: -

Step 1

Insert an audio CD in your computer and the AutoPlay function of Windows should make a window prompt appear asking you what you wish to do with the CD. Select Rip music from CD using Windows Media Player.(If the prompt does not appear, jump to step three after starting.

Step 2

Windows Media Player should now start and after downloading information such as track titles and album art, begin automatically copying the CD's audio content to your hard drive. If it does not, or if you wish to change something about the configuration, jump to the next step.

Step 3

With Windows Media Player 11 open, the album cover art and other information should download automatically as the CD appears in the open window. If not, the album name or an indication an audio CD is in your computer should appear in the left column as seen in the photo. Select that album title or audio CD indication to view the information window about your CD (if you lack an Internet connection or for whatever reason can't get Windows Media Player to input the information automatically, you can right click on the various text in the window and input the information yourself).

Step 4

Click on the Rip tab along the upper menu bar. If you are happy with the default settings of Windows Media Player 11, you can click Start Rip in the lower right corner and start copying the audio CD. If you wish to change something, click on the arrow below the Rip tab and select More Options.

Step 5

In More Options you'll see you can do several things. Rip music to this allows you to select where on your computer you copy the music to (File Name allows to choose what elements of each song appear in the saved track's name). Rip settings allows you to select the audio file format type (WMA, MP3, WAV) you save each copied file as and the audio quality you wish each file to be saved at, among other features. With regards to the audio quality, generally the better sounding a music file is the larger the file is so keep that in mind as you are choosing sound quality.

Step 6

With your choices made and the More Options menu closed, you should now be ready to copy your audio CD. Click Start Rip and you'll hear your CD drive start spinning, a green status bar will appear over each song as it is copied and the Start Rip button which change to Stop Rip. Once the audio CD is ripped you can remove the CD from your computer drive and enjoy your music off your hard drive.

Change Burn Settings in Windows Media Player

by Lucas4u | 10:36 PM in , | comments (0)

Do you want to know how to change burn settings in Windows Media Player. Windows Media Player along with many other related pieces of software allows you to 'burn' audio tracks onto a blank CD-RW, these may be tracks you have purchased from Napster or MSN Music, you may wish to create backups of them.

It is possible to change the burn settings in Windows Media Player, to do this you must first load up the window:

Click Tools then Options

Then you will want to select the burn tab

Choose which options apply to your needs,

Burn Speed: How fast data is written to your CD-RW, this can be helpful if you don't have a fast CD burner

Apply Volume Levelling across all the tracks: This option will allow you to make all the audio tracks play at the same volume

Add a list of all burned files to the disk in this format:

WPL- The file format introduced in Windows Media Player Series 9 which allows you to create dynamic playlists, in Windows Media Player 9 and above the automatic playlist format is WPL.

M3U-The file format M3U was primarily used as an MP3 playlist format first introduced by WinAmp and now widely adopted by all major music software such as Realplayer, iTunes and Windows Media Player

Fit more music on the disk by converting to a lower bit rate: By selecting convert instead of do not convert you can choose the bit rate of the songs, the rule of thumb about bit rate is the larger the bit rate the larger the file size. So choose carefully whether you want more songs or better quality.

Windows Media Player 11 - Explored

by Lucas4u | 10:47 PM in , | comments (0)

Windows Media Player 11 is the most recent version of the player, which is available for Windows XP as well as Windows Vista. This new version features many changes. The Media Library no longer presents the media items (such as albums and artists) in a tree-based listing. Rather, on selecting the category in the left panel, the contents will appear on the right, in a graphical manner with thumbnails featuring album art or other art depicting the item-a departure from textual presentation of information. Missing album art can be added directly to the placeholders in the Library itself (though the program re-renders all album art imported this way into 1x1 pixel ratio, 200x200 resolution jpegs). Views for Music, Pictures, Video and Recorded TV are separate and can be chosen individually from the navigation bar. Entries for Pictures and Video show their thumbnails. Windows Media Player 11 also includes the Windows Media Format 11 runtime which adds low bitrate support (below 128 kbit/s for WMA Pro), support for ripping music to WMA Pro 10 and updates the original WMA to version 9.2.

Windows Media Player - Unleashed

by Lucas4u | 2:27 AM in , | comments (0)

Windows Media Player (WMP) is a digital media player and media library application developed by Microsoft that is used for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based devices. Editions of Windows Media Player were also released for Mac OS, Mac OS X and Solaris, but have since been discontinued.

In addition to being a media player, Windows Media Player includes the ability to rip music from and copy music to compact discs, build Audio CDs in recordable discs and synchronize content with a digital audio player (MP3 player) or other mobile devices, and enables users to purchase or rent music from a number of online music stores.

Windows Media Player replaced an earlier piece of software simply called Media Player, adding features beyond simple video or audio playback.

The default file formats are Windows Media Video (WMV), Windows Media Audio (WMA), and Advanced Systems Format (ASF), and supports its own XML based playlist format called Windows Playlist (WPL). The Zune software which actually is a modified version of Windows Media Player additionally supports AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) audio, MPEG-4 and H.264 video formats out-of-the-box.

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