PLAYING MOVIES AND MUSIC WITH WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER

Welcome back. In this final lesson, you'll take a look at some of the exciting multimedia and family-friendly features in Windows Vista Home Premium. You'll see how Windows makes it easy to manage your photos, music, and video clips, and to protect your household data and organize activities and schedules.

Windows Media Player 11 comes with Windows Vista -- on all versions except those sold in some parts of Europe. Windows Media Player enables you to play music CDs, rip music (copy music from audio CDs to your PC), burn CDs (copy music from your PC to audio CDs), and synchronize music with portable music players. With Windows Media Player, you can also play DVD movies and video clips in a variety of formats, and download licensed content from online music and video stores.

To start Windows Media Player, select Start > All Programs > Windows Media Player. Windows Media Player 11 has two sets of menus: the standard set (black text on gray bar) and the navigation bar (white text on black bar). In earlier versions of Windows Media Player, the items on the navigation bar were tabs; the navigation bar is simply a variation on that theme. Each tab is also a button that opens a menu, as shown in Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1: The Windows Media Player 11 interface.
Figure 4-1: The Windows Media Player 11 interface.

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From Windows Media Player, you can do the following:

  • Play an audio CD: Insert an audio CD, and the AutoPlay dialog box opens, as shown in Figure 4-2. Click Play audio CD using Windows Media Player. It starts playing automatically. On the Now Playing tab in Windows Media Player, you can see the tracks on the CD and double-click one to jump to it.

If you have other players installed, they also appear in the AutoPlay dialog box list. For example, in Figure 4-2, you could also play the CD using Windows Media Center or Musicmatch Jukebox. Windows Media Center is covered later in this lesson.

Figure 4-2: When you insert an audio CD, AutoPlay asks you what to do with it.
Figure 4-2: When you insert an audio CD, AutoPlay asks you what to do with it.
  • Rip a CD: Insert an audio CD, and in the AutoPlay dialog box, click Rip music from CD using Windows Media Player.
  • Play digital music clips: Clips already ripped to your PC can be played from the Library tab. Just double-click the clip you want to play, or create a playlist.
  • Play a DVD movie: Insert the DVD. If Windows Media Player is set up to be the default player for DVDs, it starts playing there automatically. If not, select the Play menu, and then select DVD,VCD, or CD Audio.
  • Burn an audio CD: Insert a blank audio CD, click the Burn tab, and then drag-and-drop files from your library to the blank CD.
  • Synchronize with a portable digital music player: Connect your player to your PC, and then click the Sync tab and follow the prompts there.

Next, learn how to use Windows Media Center.