Manage your digital media

Organize music and movies with Windows Media Player

By Wayne MacPhail

Ever imagine your media files were socks and underwear? Didn’t think so, but bear with me. You could go through life with your socks randomly distributed throughout your bedroom or entire home. But why spend valuable time hunting for your jockeys when they can be neatly organized in a specific drawer?

Fortunately, Windows Media Player 11 is a Molly Maid for your digital media. It not only makes it easy for you to tidy up, but it can even keep track of your movies and music.

Visiting the library

Andy Lord, a senior technician at an Ancaster, Ont., computer store, treats his Windows laptop as a portable media device and uses Windows Media Player 11 to play tunes and to watch DVDs. While he admits his music collection has no real focus, he says he makes up in volume what’s missing in precision. “I’ve got some of my little brother’s hip hop collection, classic rock and Cab Calloway all over,” he explains.

The library in the player pulls together all your music, video and other rich media (media with audio, video or animation content).

You can fill the library’s media drawers yourself or let the drawers do the job for you once you point them in the right direction. For example, click on the Library button along the top of the window, click Add Library, and you’ll see that you can add an individual file, folder or even a URL (for web-based media).

If you’re using the program to play a file, you can add that current file to your library. Better still, you can ask the program to keep an eye on one or more folders and pay attention to any changes. When you toss a file into one of those folders, it winds up in the library.

Want to pull in music from your favourite CDs? No problem. You can actually “rip” tracks from your CDs. Ripping just means copying and compressing the digital music and storing it on your hard drive. You can even create or “burn” your own CDs using songs in your library.

Don’t worry about entering album, performer or song information. Windows Media Player 11 takes care of that for you and then lets you search for tunes by band, artist, title or genre. Note that you may need to adjust your privacy settings to allow the player to retrieve and display media information from the Internet. To do so, click Library > More Options > Library tab, and check the box marked Retrieve additional information from the Internet.

“I’ve always liked the simple interface of the very old versions of Media Player,” says Lord. “But for the times when I need extra features, it’s handy to have them available.”

Shopping around

You can use Windows Media Player 11 to buy and download music and videos from the Internet. The Canadian options include Farolatino.com and PayPlay.fm. You can organize your new tunes into custom playlists that you can listen to while working out — your body or your income tax. Songs purchased from web sites such as Puretracks and Napster will also be compatible with Windows Media Player. Keep in mind that some online stores — Napster, for example — will require you to download a plug-in, but it just takes a couple of minutes.

Organizing your purchases

Windows Media Player 11 will create automatic playlists based on your audio habits. Check out “Listen to on weekdays,” “Listen to at night” or “Listen to when husband is playing softball again.” Okay, I made that last one up.

You can also share  Windows media player video and audio with portable gadgets such as MP3 players, cell phones and multimedia players. To be certain these devices work with the player, just look for the PlaysForSure label on the device packaging.

So Windows Media Player 11 is a maid that can do the shopping and take care of the little ones, too. But, that lost blue sock? Your problem.

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