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For being the most widely used music manager on the planet, iTunes is a fairly lousy music manager. It routinely can't find the correct track information or incorrectly assigns track information to songs. It largely seems to happen with songs not purchased through iTunes, which makes me suspicious that the failings are by design. Enter TuneUp, which does a great job of tracking down all that missing song information. Unlike iTunes, which takes a wild guess at what your tracks are, TuneUp plays the tracks with missing data to figure out what they are. Instead of having a bunch of songs labeled Track 1, you get the real song data, correct album art, and a better organized music collection using TuneUp. Made for both Mac and Windows, TuneUp Lite is free for the first 100 albums. If you decide you like it, you can save 15% using the link below.

Download TuneUp for iTunes and try out the free version on your Mac or PC.

"I want to embed Windows Media Player into an HTML page. Where I run into trouble is if I have a drop-down navigation element that expands on top of the video area. When this happens Windows Media Player wants to stay on-top of and hide the drop-down menu. Are you aware of any reason this might happen. Other than setting the z-index, are you aware of any way to ensure that other elements that may need to sit on-top of the player can do that?"

Embedded video tends to stay on top of all other elements on a web page, regardless of whether the embedded player is Flash, Windows Media or QuickTime. While setting the z-index of the div where you embed the video can help solve the issue, a more reliable workaround requires modifying the player parameters for the particular video player you are using.

"I have a large number of music playlists. I want to print playlist files of my music so that I can keep a record of my music collection."

Depending on what you currently use to manage your music collection, printing playlists might require additional software. To print a playlist in iTunes, for instance, you simply need to choose the playlist and Print from the File menu. Windows Media Player does not include the ability to print playlists, so you need to use another application. For most playlist management, I recommend using MediaMonkey, which has a ton of features you can't get from either Windows Media Player or iTunes.

"How can I embed a .wmv file in the HTML of my Web page?"

If you want to embed a WMV file in your Web page, you need to use some custom HTML code. There are a few specific parameters to set, to specify which Windows Media Player is used on the page, whether the file starts playing automatically or not, and how it displays with other elements on the page. You also need to consider compatibility issues for people viewing with different browsers and operating systems.

"If I have a playlist of songs in iTunes, can I import my iTunes playlist in Windows Media Player and have it work there too? Or do I have to recreate my iTunes playlist in Windows Media Player?"

There is not direct solution to export a playlist from iTunes and import the playlist into Windows Media Player. The two applications use a different structure for their playlist data and don't communicate. Fortunately, there's a workaround.

"I have ripped albums into Windows Media Player and have downloaded podcasts into iTunes and would like to keep the two separate, but WMP keeps picking up podcasts which makes streaming through my albums a pain, b/c all of a sudden Ira Glass is talking to me when I was in the groove doing homework to some good jazz music. Is there a way I can keep WMP from picking up my podcasts?"

There's two ways you could go about solving this problem. One way would be to create an Auto Playlist starting at Library - Create Auto Playlist in Windows Media Player. You'd then select only tracks you want to hear by genre or other meaningful details about the songs. This first method doesn't get Windows Media Player to ignore you podcasts. If you really want to eliminate the podcast files from being exposed to Windows Media Player, you need to have the software ignore the folder where the podcasts are downloaded.

Windows Media Player allows you to choose folders to monitor. It also allows you to ignore folders completely. Start by choosing Library > More Options from the WMP top menu.

Next click the Monitor Folders button.

Click Advanced Options then select the folder containing the files you want to ignore and click ignore. If the folder is not already in the list of monitored folders because it is a sub-folder of another folder, you might need to add the folder first and then ignore it.

Keep in mind that this only works if your podcast files are downloaded to a folder different than the one your music files are stored in. You might need to separate the podcast files to their own folder and change your podcast download preferences in iTunes for this to be a permanent solution to ignoring podcasts when playing back music.

"Is it possible to play WMA songs on a regular DVD or CD player?"

If your DVD or CD player includes WMA playback support (which many do, along with MP3 playback) you can simply burn a disk of WMA files using the burn feature of Windows Media Player to create a data CD or DVD. Often the player will list this as a feature on one of the many stickers they slap on the front of the hardware. If you removed the stickers, you might need to consult your model's documentation. This typically means you can fill the disks data capacity with songs, which can be many hours of music.

In cases where your DVD player or CD player doesn't include WMA support, you'd need to burn an audio CD from your WMA library. The downside to this is you're limited to the 72 minute maximum of audio CDs.

Unless you purchased WMA tracks that came with a restriction on burning them to disk, either method should get you the desired result of being able to play the tracks in a CD or DVD player.

"I know I can stream WMV files from my laptop using Media Center with my Xbox 360. I have a few videos that are widescreen in MPEG format and these won't stream. How would I convert the widescreen videos into widescreen WMV files?"

When you say MPEG video, I'm going to assume you mean MPEG-1 or MPEG-2, rather than one of the MPEG-4 codecs which often appear with either an AVI or MP4 extension. MPEG-2 files are supposed to stream from Windows Media Center Edition to Xbox 360, but I've seen several instances where this is not the case. Microsoft has a list of supported formats in their Xbox 360 Video Playback FAQ, but they aren't entirely clear about which file extensions work for each codec. Knowing which MPEG variation your specific files are is further complicated by the fact that .mpg or .mpeg files can both have different audio and video formats inside them, which I realize doesn't help solve your video playback problem.

"Can I watch Amazon Unbox movies on my Xbox 360?"

Amazon Unbox videos will playback on your Xbox 360 by streaming them from any Windows computer with Windows Media Player 11 installed. This is a really convenient way to get a larger selection of downloadable movies than what's currently offered by Xbox Live Video Marketplace. Unlike streaming DivX AVI movies, which also works with the Zune software, you need to use Windows Media Player 11 to make the following steps work. Older versions of Windows Media Player will also not work.

First configure your computer to share video, music and photos with your Xbox 360. Make sure your Xbox 360 is turned on and connected to your home network before beginning.

Click the Now Playing button at the top of the Windows Media Player 11 interface and choose More Options. On the Library tab of the Options, click Configure Sharing.

Check the box next to Share my media to, then select your Xbox 360 and click Allow, so that there's a check mark on the Xbox 360 icon instead of a warning sign. Note: If you get an error message about your network, follow steps to set your network from Public to Private.

On the Media blade on your Xbox 360, choose Videos, then hit the X button to Change Video Source. Select your computer from the list of choices. You can now browse the complete library of videos on your PC, from the Xbox interface, including any Amazon Unbox downloads you have.

If you try and share Windows Media Player content in Windows Vista, you might get the following warning:

Your network is a public network. Sharing is disabled to protect your privacy. If you consider this to be a private network, change network settings.

You can fix this by clicking on the Networking button on the warning, then clicking Customize next to the information about your network to change from Public to Private.

You'll then need to go back to Windows Media Player and turn on sharing.