Sounding Out Windows Media Player 364 • A group of items (gathered by clicking with the pointer on multiple items while holding down the Ctrl key) • Collections of items (items sorted into categories such as albums, artists, genres, and other information or ratings) If the List pane isn’t visible, click the Show List Pane button (a large blue arrow). The button is to the right of the WMP search box. If the arrow points to the left, the pane isn’t displayed; if it points to the right, clicking the arrow removes the List pane. If the List pane already contains items, you can remove all of them at once by clicking the Clear List Pane button (a stylized red X at the top of the playlist). 5. Double-click an item to begin playing it. If you selected a group or collection, all the items play; to select a single item only, drag the item to the List pane instead. Right-clicking a track opens the way to a Properties window with details about the bit rate and other details of the recording, in this case a subpar 128 Kbps disc. Some audio or video files contain markers, which are like tracks on a CD or chapters on a DVD. If the file you selected has markers, you can jump to any section by selecting a marker, and play audio or video from that point: 1. Click the View menu (part of the Classics Menu). 2. Point to File Markers. 3. Click the marker you want. The WMP includes electronic versions of the familiar VCR control buttons. The large right-facing triangle starts the selected item; once a piece of music or video is playing, that icon changes to a pair of vertical bars that function as a pause button. On either side of the play/pause button you find a button that returns to the start or end of a file. And finally, all the way to the left is a square box that stops things. See Figure 1-1. If you’re playing a recorded video, an added control sits just above the VCR- like buttons. You can grab the Seek slider with the onscreen pointer and move it left to back up to an earlier part of the video; move the slider right to advance to a later section. You may find it difficult, if not impossible, to grab hold of the little blue Seek button as it moves; click the pause button to freeze the image and then move the slider. 25 140925-bk05ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:48 PM Page 364 Book V Chapter 1 Walking Through Windows Media Player Sounding Out Windows Media Player 365 Playing a file from outside your Library To go directly to a collection or an individual media file somewhere on your laptop, the easiest method is to instruct WMP to show the Classics Menu. The menu bar gives you quick and easy access to most WMP options, including ones not shown in the player’s standard buttons. 1. Press Ctrl + M key. If it’s not already, the Classics Menu view turns on and the menu bar appears. 2. Click File ➪ Open. 3. Highlight the file you want to play. 4. Click Open. Playing a file from a web page or at a network location Windows Media Player can control a file that lives on a web page, at a location on the Internet, or on a local network. To play a file on a web page, click the link on the web page. Figure 1-1: Windows Media Player has identified a CD inserted into the drive on my laptop (a relatively antique and certainly obscure mix of operettas) and is ready to play it. 25 140925-bk05ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:48 PM Page 365 Sounding Out Windows Media Player 366 To play a file on the Internet by entering the URL (its Web address) to the file, follow along: 1. Press Ctrl + M. 2. Click File ➪ Open URL. 3. Type the file’s URL. 4. Click OK. Rocking the CD or DVD hardware Way back in the days of old, you needed a separate CD player to play a music disc. And for you really old folk, there was this thing called a record player that used vinyl platters and a tone arm with a diamond-tipped needle the converted little squiggles on the platter into sound waves, at least until the needle finally wore a hole in the platter. And you also used to need a DVD player to produce a movie’s video and audio. Before then there was the suitcase-sized VCR, and before that? Well, you had to watch a television set or actually leave your house to go to a movie theater. But I digress: Today’s modern laptop computers are pretty close to being the master of all media. A built-in optical drive can play high-quality music or display high-resolution images from a nearly indestructible disc (because its digital information is read by pulses of laser light). As delivered, Windows Media Player can play audio CDs or data CDs that contain music or video files. It can also display files written to video CDs (VCDs). VCDs are similar to DVDs, although the images’ quality and size aren’t as large and the disc capacity is about 1 ⁄8 that of a DVD. To play a DVD in your laptop, you need a DVD drive and the appropriate DVD decoder software installed in your system. Some decoders are set to work only with their own DVD player software, while others work also within Windows Media Player. You can — within the range of capabilities of your tiny laptop speakers — adjust some of the music’s tonal qualities and range by using the graphic equalizer that is part of WMP. See Figure 1-2. The graphic equalizer adjusts the relative strength of the audio signal across its range from bass (in this case, 31 Hz) to high treble (16 KHz). You can also choose various effects that make your music visual, in the case of Figure 1-2, a fountain-like display that would be right at home out front of a Las Vegas casino. 25 140925-bk05ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:48 PM Page 366 Book V Chapter 1 Walking Through Windows Media Player Sounding Out Windows Media Player 367 Controlling a CD with WMP Start the player first, and then insert a CD into the laptop’s optical drive. In most situations, your system is set up to start playing within WMP when it automatically recognizes the presence of a disc. If the disc doesn’t automatically load (start), or if you installed the disc into the drive before you started WMP, follow these steps: 1. Click the arrow below the Now Playing tab. 2. Click the letter or name of the drive that contains the disc. The CD starts playing from the beginning. However, if you’d like to skip one or more tracks on a CD, follow these steps: 3. Click the Now Playing tab. 4. Click the Next button. The icon shows two right-facing arrows and a single bar — the designer’s way of indicating fast-forward to the next section. If you change your mind and want to hear a song you skipped, double- click the song in the playlist. It plays immediately. Figure 1-2: Adjusting the relative strength of the audio signal across its range from bass to high treble. 25 140925-bk05ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:48 PM Page 367 Sounding Out Windows Media Player 368 5. When you’re done, find the disc’s name in the Navigation pane. 6. Right-click its name. 7. Click Eject. This stops the disc and ejects it from the drive. Controlling a DVD with WMP Start the player and put a DVD into the drive. Your system is probably set up to start playing within WMP when it reads the disc. Playing chapters You can play video on WMP with these steps: 1. Start the player. 2. Insert a DVD into the laptop’s optical drive. If the disc starts automatically, skip to Step 5. If the disc doesn’t automatically load (start), or if you installed the disc into the drive before you started WMP, follow Steps 3 and 4. 3. Click the arrow below the Now Playing tab. 4. Click the letter or name of the drive that contains the disc. The video starts playing from the beginning. However, you don’t have to be a slave to the order. Skip to different parts with these steps: • To choose individual sections of DVD, click a DVD title or chapter name in the List pane. • To choose a specific part of a VCD, double-click a VCD segment in the List pane. 5. Right-click the disc’s name in the Navigation pane. 6. Click Eject. This stops the disc and ejects it from the drive. Playing special features DVD creators can add from a palette of special features; Windows Media Player supports most of them. Among them you may find are playing special features on a DVD such as foreign language dubbing, subtitles, “director’s commentaries” that substitute for or augment the actors’ words, and parental controls. To play special features on a DVD, follow along: 25 140925-bk05ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:48 PM Page 368 Book V Chapter 1 Walking Through Windows Media Player Sounding Out Windows Media Player 369 1. Click the DVD button. 2. Click Root Menu. The Root Menu is called Title Menu on some systems. 3. Click the Now Playing tab. 4. Click the links to any available special features. 5. Click the DVD button and then click Close Menu. This starts or resumes playback. On some DVDs you can simulate a camera-angle adjustment. (Actually, it’s more of a viewing angle if you think about it, but they didn’t ask me when they named the feature.) Click the DVD button. Select Camera Angle if it’s available. Choose the viewing angle you want to use. Follow these steps to use parental controls for DVDs: 1. Sign in as the administrator for your laptop. 2. Create a Limited or Restricted user account for each person who’ll use the laptop with parental control settings applied. If you don’t set up your computer with Windows user accounts and passwords, you’re double-locking the front door while leaving the back door wide open. 3. Start Windows Media Player. 4. Click the arrow below the Now Playing tab. 5. Click More Options ➪ DVD tab ➪ Change Settings. 6. In Select a Rating, select the highest Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating that you want users with Limited/Restricted accounts to watch. As an example, if you select PG, the user with that account can’t watch a DVD with a more restrictive rating, such as PG-13 or R. Standard file types for WMP Windows Media Player plays back files recorded in many — but not all — of the most common formats for audio, video, and images. You can add supported file types by installing their codecs as supplied by third-party companies or by Microsoft. 25 140925-bk05ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:48 PM Page 369 Sounding Out Windows Media Player 370 A codec is a piece of software that compresses or decompresses (co-dec) a digital media file. If you’re looking for additional codecs, Microsoft recommends visiting www.WMPlugins.com to search for officially endorsed system expansions; they warn that installing codecs from other sources may cause incompatibil- ities, file corruption, and dandruff. Okay, I made up that last serious medical issue, but the other two problems are the sort of thing you want to avoid. Table 1-1 shows the standard file types that Windows Media Player works with. Table 1-1 Windows Media Player Files File Abbreviation File Format Audio CD cda Audio Windows Media audio asx, .wm, .wma, .wmx Audio Windows audio .wav Audio MP3 Audio .MP3, .m3u Audio Windows Media .wm, .asf Video Windows Media video .wmv Video Windows video .avi Video Microsoft Recorded TV file .dvr-ms Video Movie file .mpeg, .mpg, .mpe, .mlv, .mp2, mpv2 Video Compressed image files .jpg, .jpeg, gif Picture Tagged Image File .tif, .tiff Picture Bitmap .bmp Picture Windows Metafile .wmf Picture Portable Network Graphics .png Picture What important file types are missing from this list? If your digital camera stores images in a RAW format, files of that sort aren’t supported by WMP; you should be able to change the camera settings to TIFF or JPG or use a different graphics program to process them. Also not supported: animated GIF files, which you can view only as still images. Setting Windows Media Player as default program As a multipurpose “player,” you can set up WMP as the default program for specific media types or for all its supported file formats. You can also make an AutoPlay setting so WMP is automatically used to playback CDs or DVDs that you put into your laptop’s optical drive. 25 140925-bk05ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:48 PM Page 370 Book V Chapter 1 Walking Through Windows Media Player Sounding Out Windows Media Player 371 To assign WMP as the default player for a particular type of file, do the following: 1. Open a folder that contains a file of the type you want to change. 2. Right-click the file you want to change, and then click Open With. 3. Click the name of the program you want to use to open this file automatically. 4. Select the Always Use the Selected Program to Open This Kind of File check box. If you’d rather not have WMP as the default, deselect the check box. 5. Click OK. Menus, tabs, and classical music Microsoft’s engineers spent years trying to make every Windows application and utility look and act more or less the same; with the arrival of Office 2007 and Windows Vista they began to get jiggy with it. Windows Media Player is one of the products that has group-related tasks under tabs or in ribbons that mutate based on the tasks you’re currently performing . . . or on the system’s guess about what you’re about to do next. In WMP, the old menu bar is still available even though Microsoft no longer wants to use that name; they call it the Classics Menu. The quickest way to show Classic Menus is to open Windows Media Player and press the Ctrl + M key combination. Press the same keys to go back to the future. If you want to get to the same place by a slightly more complex route, do this: 1. Right-click an empty area of the taskbar. 2. Click Show Classic Menus from the popup mini-window. Good empty places include just to the left of the Now Playing tab or a blank space to the left or right of the playback controls. To hide the menu bar, reverse the steps and remove the check mark next to Show Classic Menus. WMP tabs are displayed even if you also turn on the Classics Menu bar. You can base your commands on the method that works best for you. In my experience, the tabs work best for preset commands, while the menu bar is the most efficient way to get into the program to make changes to settings or configuration. 25 140925-bk05ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:48 PM Page 371 Rip It Good 372 The standard tabs follow: ✦ Now Playing. Here you can initiate the play of a CD or DVD, choose a visualization (you might call it a picture or an abstract image that pulses in time with the music), shuffle items on your play list, repeat songs on the list when all have been played, change volume and other audio settings, or switch to full-screen mode. ✦ Library. This section provides access to your digital media collection and offers tools to organize them. Click one of the items in the address bar (on the left side of the window) to choose among music, pictures, or video. You can also create, edit, or delete playlists (collections of music sorted in any manner you choose). ✦ Rip. Here’s the doorway to taking digital files from a CD and making a copy on your hard disc for other purposes. You change settings, including the file format and the bit rate (the amount of information collected per millisecond of audio). ✦ Burn. Once you create a playlist, you can burn it to an audio CD for replay in a home or car stereo system or other device. This tab also includes adjustments to settings for the quality of the CD (including some basic audio-editing features such as making the volume of all songs equal across the entire disc). ✦ Sync. Here you can bring songs back and forth between devices you might attach to you laptop, including portable music players and memory devices. ✦ Media Guide. This gateway goes to an expanding number of online stores that are ready, willing, and happy to sell you their services, including individual song tracks, entire albums, or online streaming services including satellite radio (converted to an Internet stream). Rip It Good Ripping is the process of copying music from an audio CD to a computer. If you use WMP to rip music, it reads the digital information on the disc and stores a copy on your hard disk as a WMA (Windows Media Audio) or MP3 file. Both of these file formats use compression to reduce the size of the files; in doing so, some of the original CD’s quality is lost, although not all listeners can tell the difference between an original and the copy. Once you rip a file, you can play it directly from its storage place on the hard disk or download it to a portable music player (like an Apple iPod or a Microsoft Zune). You also can burn the files to a CD as a personal mix or as a copy of the original CD. 25 140925-bk05ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:48 PM Page 372 Book V Chapter 1 Walking Through Windows Media Player Rip It Good 373 Be aware that most music, video, and other intellectual property is copy- righted and may be sold with a license that limits its use. For example, the book you’re holding in your hand is copyrighted by the publisher, who has purchased that right from the author. You have the right to read the book, give it to someone else, or resell it, but in general you don’t have the right to photocopy its contents or scan it into digital form and store it away from the book itself. In general, it’s considered acceptable to rip a disc that you own but not so legal to make a copy of someone else’s music. The verb rip word contains a hint of its probable origin: “ripping off” some- thing that doesn’t belong to you. That may or may not be the case in your own system. The thinking behind the legal hair-splitting is this: If you’re making a copy of something you own and don’t sell or give away the original, you still are only able to play the music on one device at a time. But if you copy a disc and give it to someone else or share the digital file over the Internet, two or tens of thousands of people could play the music at the same time, and that wasn’t expected by the music owner when it was sold in the first place. Windows Media Player 11 doesn’t support copying the contents of copy- protected video DVDs. Ripping a file is as easy as a click: 1. Place a CD in your laptop drive. WMP may immediately start playing the first song on the disc. You can rip a file while it plays, or you can stop playback and individu- ally select the tracks on the CD that you want to copy to the laptop. 2. To stop playback, click the Now Playing button 3. Click the VCR-like square box. 4. To rip a file, click the Rip button. The software lists all the tracks on an audio CD; for nearly all CDs, the program can communicate with a Microsoft or third-party server for information about the disc including, in many cases, an image of the cover art. See Figure 1-3. Windows Media Player adds ripped files to your Player Library. During Windows installation, by default that location is set as \MUSIC under the user name currently signed in (for example, C:\Users\Corey Sandler\Music). You can change the storage place for ripped files by displaying the Options dialog box. (Display the Classic Menu toolbar, click Tools ➪ Options ➪ Rip Music tab.) See Figure 1-4. 25 140925-bk05ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:48 PM Page 373 . use. Follow these steps to use parental controls for DVDs: 1. Sign in as the administrator for your laptop. 2. Create a Limited or Restricted user account for each person who’ll use the laptop with. rating, such as PG-13 or R. Standard file types for WMP Windows Media Player plays back files recorded in many — but not all — of the most common formats for audio, video, and images. You can add. program As a multipurpose “player,” you can set up WMP as the default program for specific media types or for all its supported file formats. You can also make an AutoPlay setting so WMP is automatically