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Book IV Chapter 1 Jammin’ with Windows Media Player 337 Syncing with a Portable Player or Mobile Phone Figure 1-25: To burn a data disc (full of MP3s), be sure to choose Data CD or DVD before you start the burn. Syncing with a Portable Player or Mobile Phone Call it an MP3 player, if you will. Call it a Zune. (The folks at Microsoft do, but they kinda have a vested interest.) Or, call it a portable digital audio player or a personal digital device. Moving your songs from your computer to an MP3 player has never been simpler. Most mobile phones are just as easy. Audio is only part of the story, though. The new generation of portable video machines — whether you call the device a Portable Media Center (a term trademarked by Microsoft, of course), MP4 player, fancy phone, video juke- box, digital video player, or that dern MTV thingy — seems poised to take over the toy market. Windows Media Player handles both audio and video (including recorded TV) with aplomb. In fact, when WMP works right, transferring files to your portable player is every bit as easy as burning a CD. It’s easier, actually, because you don’t have to put a blank CD in the drive. If you can’t get WMP to work with your particular MP3 player or phone, you may have to resort to using the software that came with the machine. That’s a pity, really, and the number of nonconformist players and phones has fallen off in recent years. But realize that the WMP way isn’t the only way, and you may have to fall back on the Sony or LG or Nokia or Samsung soft- ware that came with your machine. If you have an iPod, you can’t use Windows Media Player, either. The iPod has a weird internal format, and syncing with WMP doesn’t add songs to iPod playlists. You have to use iTunes, Winamp, or another iPod-speaking media program. See Book IV, Chapter 2 for details. 338 Syncing with a Portable Player or Mobile Phone The very best, very latest players and phones (except the iPod family) work with the phenomenal Windows 7 Device Stage. If you have a new player or phone and the advertising says that it works with Device Stage, don’t hang around here. Hop over to Book VIII, Chapter 2 and revel in your wondrous purchase. Moving tracks to the player Here’s how to get your tunes and flicks onto your MP3 or video player: 1. Attach your player/phone/whatever to one of your computer’s USB ports and turn it on. Windows 7 should identify the player with the Found New Hardware Wizard. If all else fails, read the player’s instruction manual and run the program on the CD that came with the player to get the drivers work- ing. You may need to visit the manufacturer’s Web site to download the latest drivers. This technology is changing fast, and drivers become obsolete overnight. If your MP3 player holds more than 4GB of data and your music collec- tion is less than 4GB, Windows Media Player asks your permission as soon as you plug in your player and then automatically syncs your player, copying all your music from your computer to your player. Personally, I don’t worry about it too much. My music collection hasn’t measured less than 4GB since about 1993. Bet you’re in the same boat. 2. Start Windows Media Player if Windows 7 doesn’t start it for you. Click the Sync tab if it isn’t already showing. Windows 7 shows you the MP3 device in the upper-right corner (see “Sansa e270” in Figure 1-26) and sets up a sync list for you. Figure 1-26: Syncing with an MP3 player is easy. Book IV Chapter 1 Jammin’ with Windows Media Player 339 Syncing with a Portable Player or Mobile Phone 3. Use whatever tricks are at your disposal (clicking entries on the left, sorting, searching) to find tracks that you want to transfer to the MP3 player. Click each track and drag it to the Sync List on the right. See the section “Finding the tracks you want,” earlier in this chapter, for details. Watch the “remaining” counter to fill your MP3 player as far as possible. If you drag too many songs to the sync list, right-click any you want to remove and choose Remove from List. 4. To save your new playlist (and you should), click Sync List at the top of the sync list and type a new name. 5. Click the Start Sync button. WMP copies the files in your playlist to your portable player. If your MP3 player didn’t have enough room, Windows Media Player simply states that the track or tracks weren’t copied. Note that nothing on your MP3 player gets deleted. Syncing with WMP is quite different from syncing with iTunes (see Book IV, Chapter 2). 6. When the copying is done, unplug your portable player and have at it. Transferring songs, video, and TV shows is truly that simple, as long as your media files are the kind your player understands. If you need to convert files on your computer into formats that your player can understand, remember that Google is your friend. For example, to search for converters that can change QuickTime MOV files into AVI files (which essentially all portable video players can understand), search Google for convert MOV AVI free. Moving tracks from the player to your PC If you have tracks on your player that you want to copy to your PC, this sec- tion is the one for you — unless you have an iPod. If you have an iPod, copying music from your iPod to your computer involves a trip through Windows Explorer, with hidden files displayed. It isn’t difficult, but it’s a pain in the neck. See Book IV, Chapter 2 for details. The method I explain in that chapter works for copying files from any other kind of MP3 player to your computer too, but why bother? Windows Media Player makes it easy to “reverse sync” your music. To reverse-sync your music from your player to your PC using Windows Media Player, follow these steps: 340 Syncing with a Portable Player or Mobile Phone 1. Plug your MP3 player into your computer. Windows Media Player may appear, showing the Sync tab. If this doesn’t happen, start Windows Media Player and click the Sync tab. You should see an invitation to drag songs off your MP3 player and stick them on your computer, as shown in Figure 1-27. Figure 1-27: WMP offers to sync tracks on your MP3 player, sticking them on your computer. 2. On the left, click the name of your MP3 player and then click the Music folder underneath. 3. Navigate to the songs you want to copy to your PC. You can use any of the typical tricks, including a search. 4. Click and drag the songs you want to retrieve to the sync list on the right. The Start Sync link magically turns into a Copy from Device link. 5. After you gather all the songs you want to copy to your PC, click the Copy from Device button. WMP lists each song and lets you know when they’ve been copied. The songs end up in your computer’s Public Music folder or whichever folder you designated as your default folder for ripped music. See the sec- tion “Copying from a CD (Also Known As Ripping),” earlier in this chapter. Deleting tracks from your player What? You’re tired of listening to the same Weird Al Yankovic song a hun- dred million times? Does it make you break out in hives? Zap it! Book IV Chapter 1 Jammin’ with Windows Media Player 341 Sharing Your Windows Media Player Media WMP makes it surprisingly easy to manually delete any song you like. But before you make any rash decisions — sorry, Al — why not create a backup copy of the song, before you send it to that big bit bucket in the sky? Here’s how: 1. Follow the steps in the preceding section to copy to your PC the songs you want to delete from your player. If a particular song is already on your PC and you try to reverse-sync it, WMP simply tells you that the song is already in the library. No biggie. 2. When WMP finishes copying all the songs to your PC, right-click the song in the Copy from Device list on the left and choose Delete (see Figure 1-28). Figure 1-28: Deleting songs from your MP3 player is easy, too — if you know the trick. 3. When WMP asks for confirmation that you want to delete the song from the MP3 player, click the OK button, and it’s gone. Sharing Your Windows Media Player Media Windows Media Player can make media in its libraries available to other computers on your network by using the streaming technique. To a first approximation, streaming involves using your Windows 7 PC to send signals to a digital media player, which can then play the music or show a movie on a television. That can be mighty handy if you want to hook up an Xbox 360, or some other network digital media player, to play songs or movies. The mechanics for setting up a network in your house or small office are straightforward. The mechanics for sharing things over the network aren’t quite so easy. 342 Sharing Your Windows Media Player Media I talk about networking and sharing all sorts of things in Book VII, Chapter 2. If your Windows 7 computer is part of a HomeGroup (see Book VII, Chapter 1) and you haven’t changed any settings, your computer automatically shares everything in its media libraries (Music Library, Video Library, Recorded TV Library, Picture Library) with all other computers in the HomeGroup and with every user on every computer in the HomeGroup. If you have an Xbox 360 or some other kind of networked digital media player that doesn’t understand HomeGroups, you should hop into Windows Media Player and give Windows permission to share your media — assuming that you want to share your media. Here’s how to share all your media: 1. Start Windows Media Player and click the Play tab. 2. In the upper-left corner, click Stream➪More Streaming Options. You see the Media Streaming Options dialog box. Depending on how many computers you have connected to your network, it looks more or less like Figure 1-29. Figure 1-29: Media sharing options. 3. In the Show Devices On drop-down box, choose All Networks. 4. Click the button marked Allow All. This step sets up streaming for any device now connected to your net- work. It also opens your media libraries to other computers on your network. Windows Media Player on those other computers shows your media libraries under the Other Libraries entry on the left side of the main Windows Media Player window. Book IV Chapter 1 Jammin’ with Windows Media Player 343 Customizing WMP If you get stuck with C.R.A.P. media that plays only on your computer, streaming in this way may be a viable option — if your network is fast enough to handle the load. Customizing WMP You can customize WMP in a large number of ways. You get to most of the settings by choosing Organize➪Options. This command displays a dialog box with a bunch of tabs for customizing many aspects of WMP behavior:  ✦ Player: Controls general aspects of WMP behavior, such as checking for automatic updates.  ✦ Rip Music: Controls aspects of the copying process, including, most importantly, the format of ripped CDs (which you set to MP3 already, right?). You can also control the amount of data compression to apply when copying a CD. (More compression makes the copied tracks occupy less space, but reduces sound quality.) It also controls the folder to which music is copied. (You changed it to your computer’s Public Music folder, right?)  ✦ Devices: Lists available devices that WMP can use (such as CD drives and portable players) and enables you to control certain aspects of their behavior. If you tend to rip CDs with lots of scratches, click the Devices tab, click your DVD drive, and then click Properties. In the Rip section at the bottom (see Figure 1-30), select the Use Error Correction check box and click OK. That makes ripping go slower, in some circumstances, but increases the chances that you perform a clean rip, even from an iffy CD. Figure 1-30: Tell Windows to keep trying, over and over, to produce a high- quality rip. 344 Customizing WMP  ✦ Burn: A subject I talk about extensively in the section “Burning CDs and DVDs,” earlier in this chapter.  ✦ Performance: Lets you control how WMP handles streaming media.  ✦ Library: Controls whether WMP looks for video files in the Pictures Library, whether volume-leveling information should be calculated for new files, and how WMP retrieves information from the Internet.  ✦ Privacy and Security: Primarily controls how much information you send to Microsoft every time you use WMP. See the section “Adjusting WMP Privacy Settings,” earlier in this chapter. My privacy settings are shown at the beginning of this chapter (refer to Figure 1-4). If you decide to give Microsoft more information than the amount shown in that figure, I strongly recommend that you click the Read the Privacy Statement Online link and read the information with a thoroughly jaundiced eye.  ✦ DVD: Sets the default language that’s used when playing DVDs.  ✦ Network: Lets you select the network protocols that WMP may use to receive streaming media. It also lets you control proxy settings, which you may have to change if your computer is on a local-area network pro- tected by a separate firewall. It would take an advanced degree in computer science to even begin to understand many of these settings. Come to think of it, I have an advanced degree in computer science and I don’t understand some of those settings. It’s a good policy to change one of the options only if you understand it well and keep careful notes so that you can restore the original setting if anything goes wrong. There’s no harm in looking at the options, though. You can discover a lot by rummaging through each tab of the Options dialog box. Chapter 2: iPod and iTunes in Windows 7 In This Chapter ✓Getting your iPod to work ✓Getting your iPod to work right ✓Copying songs from your iPod to your computer ✓Solving the problems everyone has with iPods and Windows S o you went out and splurged on a brand-new iPod, eh? Yeah. Me, too — six times, at last count. That teensy, tiny Shuffle is positively o-o-o-zes cool. No doubt you’ve discovered that the iPod works fine with Windows — as long as you use Apple software and buy from the Apple music store, and you don’t want to do anything Apple doesn’t want you to do. B-o-r-i-n-g. Look. You bought your iPod. You paid for your music (or you got it for free, legitimately). You bought your PC. You paid for Windows 7. So why in the heck are you treated like a criminal every time you want to do something reasonable? As Windows 7 hit the stands, Apple and the iTunes Store were experiencing a traumatic transition: Before 2009, Apple controlled the music you bought in the iTunes Store, and you had few options and no rights. Because most iPod owners bought their music from the Apple iTunes Store, Apple called the tune and set the rules for what you can and can’t do with your purchase. It’s all about C.R.A.P. music; see Book IV, Chapter 1 for details. By the time Windows 7 arrived in the fall of 2009, Apple had seen the error of its ways (and the plummeting of its income) and converted almost all its iTunes tunes to the MP3 format, which can’t be controlled. You, too, can convert your digital-rights-encumbered iTunes tracks to so- called iTunes Plus music (the Plus means “C.R.A.P free”) for 30 cents per song. (See www.apple.com/itunes/whatsnew.) So, if you made a mistake and paid Apple for digital-rights-locked music, you can pay them again and get the music unlocked. Golly. Contents Chapter 2: iPod and iTunes in Windows 7 345 What You Can’t Do 346 iPod the Apple Way 348 Copying Songs to Your PC 360 Taking a Look at the iPod Ecosystem 362 346 What You Can’t Do Because upward of 5 billion Apple-locked songs are running around, this chapter has to cover the unsavory, and increasingly obsolete, restrictions that Apple still imposes on its old songs. The restrictions are going away gradually, but if you can’t figure out why iTunes prevents you from perform- ing perfectly reasonable actions with your own songs, the tricks in this chap- ter should help. What You Can’t Do I bet you’ve shed more than a few tears (and sworn more than a few syl- lables) trying to figure out why these things happen:  ✦ You can’t use Windows Media Player to put music on your iPod. Why? No way will Microsoft do anything to support iPod. Well, okay, maybe if UFOs invade Lake Washington and a hundred little green aliens march into Bill G’s living room, chanting “I pod, you pod, we all pod for iPod. . . .”  ✦ You can’t upload music from your iPod to your PC, using either iTunes or Windows Media Player. Why? Apple wants you to buy more music from the iTunes Store. Microsoft wants you to buy more from the MSN Music store (or whatever front it’s using this week). Neither Microsoft nor Apple nor the music com- panies want you to use your iPod to move music from one PC to another, even if you bought and paid for the music. Ka-ching. But a solution exists. See the section “Copying Songs to Your PC,” later in this chapter.  ✦ You can play MP3s on your iPod and play music you bought from iTunes on your iPod, but you can’t play music that you bought from other services on your iPod — unless, of course, you were smart enough to buy MP3 music. Why? Because every place that sells music other than MP3s is banking on customer ignorance to keep the suckers — er, customers — tethered. My favorite example: Microsoft’s old PlaysForSure campaign. If you bought music from Microsoft that “plays for sure,” you got hoodwinked — the music doesn’t play, for sure, on most MP3 players. If you have unprotected WMA files (that’s the Microsoft proprietary music format), iTunes gleefully translates them into AACs (to a first approximation that’s Apple’s proprietary format), and the translated files play on your iPod.  ✦ You can’t add music from two computers to the same iPod. Why? When you connect an iPod to a computer it becomes “tethered” to that computer. As long as you only plug it into the same computer, everything (usually) works as advertised. But when you move the iPod to a second computer, iTunes wants to erase all the old music and sync with the music on the second computer. Of course, Apple stands to [...]... Windows 7 should stumble for a few seconds, put a bubble in the notification area (near the clock) saying that it’s installing the new device, and then confirm that the device is installed When Windows 7 comes back up for air, it shows you an AutoPlay dialog box, like the one shown in Figure 3-2 Figure 3-2: Windows 7 is ready to transfer pictures 2 Click the Import Pictures Using Windows icon Windows. .. Default Player for Audio Files In the past, Apple has used the update “permission” to bother iTunes users into installing Safari and putting ten new icons on the desktop If you let iTunes take over all your audio files, it appears in all sorts of weird places and does things that aren’t at all intuitive — to me, anyway 5 Click Install The installer splashes an ad on your screen, does its thing, and ends... accustomed to working with, say, Photoshop But for most of us, the Windows 7 photo and video capabilities are good enough, and they’re remarkably easy to use They also tie in, reasonably well, with Windows Live Photo Gallery, which I discuss in detail in Book IV, Chapter 5 and Windows Live Movie Maker, which you can find in Book IV, Chapter 6 The Windows 7 video/photo shtick is composed of three programs... iTunes in Windows 7 364 Book IV: Joining the Multimedia Mix Chapter 3: Discovering Digital Cameras and Recorders In This Chapter ✓ Choosing a camera ✓ Buying a camera ✓ Moving photos and movies to your PC ✓ Sharing your shots M icrosoft spent a lot of time and money adding rudimentary but capable photo and movie features to Windows 7 The result won’t impress anyone who’s accustomed to working with,... special Apple mailing list, thereby ensuring a constant run of ju — er, informative e-mails — that keep you up to date with Apple news and the latest information Submit your e-mail address, if you like, but realize that you don’t need to give Apple anything more You’ve already given it your money The iTunes installer appears, as shown in Figure 2-1 Remember that installing iTunes also brings along QuickTime,... Windows Live Photo Gallery works with photos on your computer (or on your network) You can adjust, crop, rotate, print, or burn photos to CD or adjust them for red-eye reduction The Live Photo Gallery also lets you run a bunch of photos you choose as a slide show I talk about Windows Live Photo Gallery — one of those “Live” programs that you need to download — in Book IV, Chapter 5 Technically, Windows. .. movie-playing program from Apple that I’ve been swearing at for a decade 3 Click Next to start the installation and then click through the End User License Agreement (EULA) You see the Installation Options dialog box, shown in Figure 2-2 iTunes asks permission to bug you, for not only iTunes but also any other program that Apple wants to throw your way Book IV Chapter 2 iPod and iTunes in Windows 7 Windows. .. Discovering Digital Cameras and Recorders Windows 7 copies all pictures on the camera and puts them in a folder labeled with the current date and the tag you typed in Step 5 In Figure 3 -5, I imported the pictures on March 11, 2009, and gave them the tag Phuket, so Windows 7 created a new folder named \ Pictures\2009-03-11 Phuket and put all the pictures there  372 Moving Images to Your Computer Mission... personally create, now you know why When iTunes finishes syncing — copying the songs from iTunes to the iPod — it tells you, in the box at the top of the iTunes window, that the sync is complete, as shown in Figure 2-11 Figure 2-11: Start grooving! The downside of automatically syncing During a sync, iTunes reigns: What’s on iTunes is synced to your iPod, according to the settings you selected in iTunes... a good tag for your pictures and click Import The imported pictures receive filenames based on the tag I typed in Step 5 In this case, they’re named Phuket 001.JPG, Phuket 002.JPG, and so on In addition, all the pictures are tagged with Phuket If you chose to erase after importing in Step 4, Windows 7 then goes into your camera and deletes all imported pictures Book IV Chapter 3 Discovering Digital . than 4GB since about 1993. Bet you’re in the same boat. 2. Start Windows Media Player if Windows 7 doesn’t start it for you. Click the Sync tab if it isn’t already showing. Windows 7 shows you. movies. The mechanics for setting up a network in your house or small office are straightforward. The mechanics for sharing things over the network aren’t quite so easy. 342 Sharing Your Windows Media. it appears in all sorts of weird places and does things that aren’t at all intuitive — to me, anyway. 5. Click Install. The installer splashes an ad on your screen, does its thing, and ends