Having Music My Way: Windows Media Player and CD Burning
Published: June 25, 2001
By Galan Bridgman, Windows XP Expert Zone Community Columnist
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Given the fundamental need we all have to express and define ourselves through music, it should come as no surprise that music is one of the key "eXPeriences" that defines Windows XP. I first realized music has a powerful influence when I learned, much to my surprise, that my given name did not derive from a favorite family member of a previous generation, or my family's cultural heritage (Ireland was my guess), but was instead the name of my parents' favorite deejay when they were in high school.
Deejays served an important role in our culture for years—introducing audiences to unfamiliar pieces as well as being hip to trends and knowing the popular hits of their target audience. But technology has now made it easy to discover, share, and collect an entirely personalized music library, and within a single generation the need for a deejay has come and gone.
Speaking for myself, I've found that no single radio station can satisfy more than a small percentage of my musical interests. (It doesn't help any that my preferences are not "mainstream.") Fortunately, we've now entered the era of digital music, never to look back. What makes digital music so attractive is its freedom from constraints imposed by media, and its convenience. Look at how the introduction of CDs killed the LP record and 8-track tape industry.
A Brave New World
Digital music is nothing if not convenient. Thanks to modern electronics, form factor can be almost any device type, size and location you can imagine. Between advanced compression techniques, increased bandwidth all around us, and cheap mass storage, the "size" of audio media is almost a non-issue. Devices that fit in the palm of your hand can store over 3 hours of music at a time, and a standard laptop can hold over 700 hours. And if that's not enough, Napster was estimated to have had about 748 million hours of music available online at its peak, with at least 12 billion songs being exchanged in a single month before the courts ordered the company to install filters.
 | The first thing that caught my attention was how Windows Media Player for Windows XP automatically downloads album cover art and information from the Internet. |  | |
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Now that we've pondered what a revolutionary time we're in, let's explore what Windows XP does to make digital music easy and enjoyable to use, and accessible in a variety of ways.
It all begins with the philosophy that the operating system itself should support the user's efforts to use digital media in every way possible. This includes, for example, built-in support for portable audio devices, file system and shell support for media content, and built-in support for burning custom CDs. It also includes Windows Media Player for Windows XP, a first-class application that is the Swiss Army knife of digital media.
What a Fine Way to Spend a Day
Let's look at what happened when I settled in for some fun with digital music. I sat down to a cleanly installed Windows XP system, some blank CDs, a portable audio player with USB support, and a stack of my favorite audio CDs. The first thing that caught my attention was how Windows Media Player for Windows XP automatically downloads album cover art and information from the Internet.
| • | I popped in the first CD, and Windows Media Player for Windows XP automatically started to play it. |
| • | I clicked Copy from CD on the left menu bar and a few seconds later the album cover art appeared, along with all the album and track names and information. (See the screenshot below.) Windows Media Player connected to the AMG All Music Guide database on the Internet and retrieved information about the CD and downloaded it. The information is now saved to my own computer, but I can edit it if I want to make any changes. |
| • | Later I popped in a CD for which the AMG database had no information. When you encounter this scenario, just click Get Names, and a search wizard will appear below the track listing. You can search the Internet. If your search turns up empty, click Not Found, and the wizard will present you with a form so you can enter your own album and track information. 
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The next thing that caught my attention was how quick and easy it is to copy some music from one CD to another to create a compilation disk.
| • | I selected a few tracks from my CD and clicked Copy Music. (Amazingly it continued to play the CD while it was copying, switching to the local disk for playback once the data had been read from CD.) |
| • | At any time during the copy process you can select or deselect tracks that have not yet been copied and Windows XP will add or remove them from the task list. |
| • | The copy process is much faster than playing a CD normally, as it is performing a data transfer at whatever speed your drive supports. |
After I put in a few CDs and copied some tracks, I went and looked at the My Music folder. Inside, I found several folders with icons of my album art on them. The folders contained the songs as .WMA files encoded at the default 64 kbps rate.
To change the default location and encoding quality rate
| • | Click Tools, and then click Options. |
| • | Click the Copy Music tab. |
You can examine WMA file properties individually through Explorer's file properties dialog, or you can switch the My Music folder view to "Details" mode and see the attributes for all files in the folder. Right-click on an attribute title in the gray bar to add or delete attribute columns.
Okay, Show Me Something I Haven't Seen Before
It was time to try copying music to a portable device. I took out the Rio 800 from SONICblue and plugged it in. Windows XP recognized it immediately.
| • | In Windows Media Player, I clicked Copy to device or CD. |
The pane on the left showed my entire Media Library with a dropdown menu that allowed me to select any portion of it by artist, genre, album, play list, and so forth. Each entry in the selection could be individually turned on or off for copying to the device. The pane on the right showed the available devices I could copy to. From the dropdown menu, I selected the Rio 800. Windows Media Player showed me what content was already on the Rio and how much space was left.
| • | I clicked the Copy Music button, and in less than two minutes all my tracks were copied to the device. |
I unplugged the Rio 800, plugged in some headphones, hit play and voila! It couldn't get any simpler.
Then, I decided to copy the same tracks onto a CD.
| • | I put a blank CD into my CD writer and clicked Copy Music. |
This time, Windows XP burned an audio CD in just a couple of minutes. Wow! I remember the hoops I used to jump through to burn a CD. Now it's so easy that it's downright fun. If you don't want music CDs, but you're looking to archive your content, you can use the built-in CD burning capabilities in Windows XP and create a CD-ROM. You can include music and documents on the same CD. The next time you pop this CD into your drive, Windows XP will detect any WMA files and bring up a wizard asking if you want to play the CD or browse it. As I said before, Windows XP does everything it can to make it easy for you to use digital media.
For a quick test, I plugged in another device, a Compaq PA-1 player. Same thing ... it just worked!
My next step is to consider replacing my home audio system with a player such as the Rio Receiver. The Rio Receiver (also sold as the Dell Digital Audio Receiver) connects to your computer and can access and play all the media stored in your library. It uses an existing Ethernet or 802.11b wireless network, or a HomePNA network through your existing phone lines. Maybe in a future article I'll write about giving away my 50 CD-changer and stereo system and going entirely digital.
I have barely scratched the surface of the goodies to be found in Windows Media Player for Windows XP. In my next article we'll look at how the Media Library enables you to create and organize your personal music collection, and I'll show you how you can add your own album art or CD information.
Galan Bridgman is a developer, architect, and enthusiast for digital media technologies. He co-developed QuickTime for Windows for Apple Computer. At Starlight Networks he developed innovative client and backend technologies using ActiveMovie® and NetShow® Server, the precursors to Windows Media Technology. He is a full-time consultant, and is currently developing a next-generation, fully-automated radio station using Microsoft Windows Media 9 Series technologies. After hours he enjoys showing others how to make the most of Microsoft's latest Windows Media applications. Check Galan's Web site for more information about him.
