Recently in Windows Media Category

"I'm 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 just got a new iPod Shuffle. All my music is currently in Windows Media Player, but I can't see it in iTunes. How can I transfer music from Windows Media Player to iTunes?"

If the songs you have in your Windows Media Player library are primarily stored in your My Music folder (or just Music in Windows Vista), you can automatically import everything into iTunes in a few simple steps. If you have music stored in other folders besides the My Music folder, you can repeat the same steps for each folder that has tracks you want to import. Follow the steps below to import your music to iTunes:

"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 ?"

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. Assuming these are either MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 files with a .mpg or .mpeg extension, you can convert them using the free video converter WinFF. The following steps will work to convert any MPEG file to WMV, whether you have an Xbox 360 or not.

Converting MPEG video to WMV with WinFF

1) After downloading and installing WinFF, launch the application and select the MPEG file or files you want to convert to WMV.
2) Choose the WMV option from the Convert to... menu.
3) Pick an Output folder to save your file(s).
4) Start Converting.

"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.

"How can I convert a WMV video file to an MP3 or WMA that I can listen to on my Sansa MP3 player?"

As with most media conversion problems, I recommend using free video converter WinFF. The app is among the most reliable solutions I've found for converting between all kinds of media formats. It's generally very fast at stripping the audio out of a video and converting it to WMA or MP3.

"Is there a way to print a list of my songs and videos with Windows Media Player 11? I could with the old version, but can't find any way to print my playlists in WMP11?"

There's no feature for printing playlists built into Windows Media Player, but there is an application you can download that will do the trick. At one point I recommended a solution called Morisoft Playlist Copier to do this, sadly it is no longer available. The next best solution is to download MediaMonkey, which includes a reporting feature to generate playlists as files that you can print.

"All my music is saved as m4a and m4p files. I just bought a new phone that only plays wma music files, so I can't use any of my m4a and m4p music files on my computer. Is there a way I can convert these files from m4a and m4p so that they work with my new phone?"

Most m4a files are created when you use iTunes to rip CDs. iTunes Music Store is the most common source of m4p files. Each of these file types require different methods for converting to wma. Because the m4p files are protected with DRM, you have to play by the iTunes Music Store rules in order to convert them - in this case, the easiest way to go from m4p to wma is to burn an Audio CD in iTunes and then use Windows Media Player to rip that CD as wma files. Converting m4a files to wma is fully automated using my favorite freeware media converter, WinFF.

I used to own a Creative MP3 player, but I just purchased a new iPod. All my music is currently in WMA format, which won't work with iTunes. How do I convert those WMA files to MP3?"

There are two easy ways to convert WMA to MP3 files compatible with your iPod. iTunes supports importing WMA files, if you plan to convert them to another format. The default option is to import them as AAC, but you can change the iTunes setting to convert WMA files to MP3s instead. I find this process to be incredibly slow and prefer to use a batch converter.

Jonathan asks, "How can someone create an Audible sound file from an mp3 or wma? Is there another reduced size file format available?"

Audible's file format is proprietary. To create an Audible file, you need to work directly with Audible. Depending on what type of audio content you are working with, you might not get any real advantage from their format anyway. Audible files are optimized for voice only audio content. While they can make music files noticeably smaller, the way the Audible codec works, it would also make a music file sound noticeably awful. If you happen to have voice audio and want the advantages of smaller files sizes with no noticeable quality loss, there are two ways you can achieve optimal sound at small file sizes.

Windows Media Audio Voice 9

My favorite way to get great sounding voice audio in small file sizes is using the Windows Media Audio Voice 9 codec. You can create Windows Media Audio files using this voice codec with Windows Media Encoder.

Before proceeding, you need to download the free Windows Media Encoder 9 Series.

To create a WMA Voice 9 file, open Windows Media Encoder and choose the New Session option to Convert a File. Select the file you want to convert, choose a name for your output file (which might simply be the original filename.wma), and select File download (computer playback) on the content distribution screen. In the encoding options, choose the preset for Voice quality audio (CBR).

At this point you can click finish to start encoding or click next if you want to add detailed tagging information to your audio file. When you're finished, you get a file that will be listenable and incredibly small. If the audio was recorded in a quiet room, it might even sound great. Chances are, you'll want to open the Properties setting and choose one of the other presets until you find an acceptable balance between file size and sound quality.

MP3 Voice Files

The other option is to convert your files to an MP3 optimized for voice. Most audio editing apps with presets have a choice for voice audio with the following recipe:
Set the bitrate to 32 kbps. Set the sample rate to 22,050 Hz and choose Mono output. In this scenario get a file at least double the size of the Windows Media file encoded above, but it will be compatible with virtually any PC as well as being compatible with iPods. It is possible to match the file size of what Windows Media Audio Voice accomplishes, but in order to achieve the same audio quality, you need to create a much larger MP3 file.

Apple offers voice audio files with file sizes and audio quality comparable to Windows Media Voice Audio using the AAC option in either iTunes or QuickTime Pro. The disadvantage to this is the files typically require either iTunes or an iPod.

Based on my previous article about embedding a WMV file in a Web page, a number of people have asked how to do this in a way that works for Mac users. Microsoft shifted all WMV playback on Mac OS X to a plug-in for QuickTime called Flip4Mac, which limits a number of the supported features for WMV playback. After getting some advice from a member of the Flip4Mac product team, I've got some solid solutions that should work for any Mac user who installs the free Flip4Mac plug-in.

Dis writes, "How come Windows Media Player doesn't put the songs onto the iPod?"

The short answer to this question is because Apple doesn't want Windows Media Player to put songs on the iPod. The easiest way for Apple to make sure iPod owners get a consistent experience is for Apple to control the process of syncing audio and video from start to finish. This means Apple optimizes the experience of using an iPod with iTunes and generally makes it difficult to use any other software with an iPod. I don't disagree with Apple's methodology, but I also like having options.

I previously offered several alternatives for getting an iPod to work with Windows Media Player. They continue to be valid alternatives with the release of Windows Media Player 11.

The only place this really falls down is if you hope to purchase a subscription to something like MTV URGE, Napster, Yahoo! Music Engine or any of the other monthly subscription services. Music subscription services will not work with an iPod. All of the music subscription services currently use Windows Media Digital Rights Management to keep you from copying the songs. This is not compatible with iPods and therefore will not work. If you want to use one of the subscription services, you need to purchase a different portable device (the iRiver Clix is a nice choice). If you already have an iPod, plan on shopping either in the iTunes Store or in the eMusic library of MP3s.

David writes, "Is there a way to take my DV tape and put only the audio onto a cd? So that people can listen to the audio from the program in their car? I do the multimedia for my church and we are just begining to get into this."

It's definitely possible to take the audio from your digital video tape and put it on a CD. The process will vary slightly depending on what video editing software you use, but the basics of getting the job done are the same in every application. I'll walk through the process of using Windows Movie Maker to capture and edit the video here.

After capturing the video with Windows Movie Maker, add the video to the editing Timeline on the Audio/Music track. Keep in mind that the maximum length for Audio CDs is 72 minutes, so if your audio is longer, you may want to split the video into two files.

From the menu, choose File > Save Movie File. Select My Computer from the list of options presented in the Save Movie Wizard.

Name the file and choose a location to save the file.

Select High Quality Audio (160 Kbps) from the list of Other Settings.

After Windows Movie Maker finishes exporting the audio, open the audio file in your favorite CD burning application and burn an Audio CD.

Additional Notes on Capturing Audio from a DV tape

If you want to save yourself some time in processing the audio, you could record the audio directly from the digital video camera's headphone line out with a computer or external audio recorder. This would give you immediate access to the audio file, without needing to wait for the computer to capture everything on the DV tape. Then simply open the file in an audio editor (like Audacity), edit the audio, save the file and burn it as an audio CD.

Christian writes, "I am trying to stream music to all the computers on my home network to give a feeling of surround sound music coming from every corner of the house. I am using Windows Media Encoder to stream but I can not figure out how to sync it up with my stream so every computer is playing in sync. What can I do?"

Home networks invariably have some amount of overhead on the network even when it appears nothing is happening, which creates a few milliseconds up to a few seconds of lag even in a finely tuned operation. The delivery tools for IP network content delivery just haven't quite reached the immediacy of frequency or amplitude modulated delivery of radio and television. This is a long winded way of saying you'll never get all the streams to be perfectly in sync.

Broadcast Audio with an FM Transmitter

Sometimes old technology can be the best (and most affordable) way to do what seems like something new. Instead of trying to squeeze a few extra milliseconds from your home data network, an easier solution is to use the power of FM radio to transmit your signal to all corners of the house. To accomplish this, you need an FM transmitter to send your music signal and some kind of FM receiver (like a radio, portable media player, or PC with built in FM tuner) to receive the transmission.

With the widespread popularity of iPods, finding an FM transmitter is a simple matter. The portable media player section of every electronics store usually has at least six to choose from. You can playback audio on one PC, connect an FM transmitter to the line out on your sound card and be broadcasting throughout your house in seconds. The Belkin TuneCast line is a solid choice for this, although there are a number of other options.

Receive Audio with a TV Tuner Card

This makes the broadcast available to your home theater system, the clock radio next to your bed, or any computer with easy access to an FM tuner (and possibly the neighbors). The trick here is to set the transmitter to a frequency with no local station.

Most of the TV tuner cards on the market also tune in FM radio. If you need to have the audio play on a PC, this is the easiest way to get no latency audio to every PC in your house. TV tuner cards with FM support can be found for $50-100 by shopping carefully online or by searching eBay.

Microsoft releases a new version of Windows Media Player about once every two years. This beta release of WMP11 both improves on features of WMP10 and bridges the gap between what we've come to expect from the current version of WMP and what we can expect to see when Vista finally ships. The biggest changes are in navigation of media, searching and the addition of more media types to the player interface.

Navigation and Playback

The new layout for Windows Media Player took a few visual cues from iTunes, most notably placing the playback button in the center of the application window. Sure iTunes has the buttons at the top and WMP11 places them at the bottom, but the similarities are still there. Granted there are only so many places you can put the playback buttons and centering them is likely better for usability. The biggest annoyance with button positioning is cutting off track information displayed because there isn't enough room to the left of the buttons to fit all the details unless the player is in full screen mode.

Navigation across the top of the application window feels more intuitive with a series of drop down buttons, although finding things like the File menu can be tough. There was a quirk on one of my installations requiring me to verify whether the player was in offline mode from the File menu and I fumbled around until settling on using Alt+F to reveal it instead of trying to locate it via mouse. Track play time is displayed up in the corner next to the minimize button, which is easier to find than scanning the bottom.

All Your Media

In addition to music and movies, Windows Media Player 11 now supports photo browsing from within the interface. The first time you pull in your pictures thumbnails load ridiculously slow, but after the player has gone through all your images this process works almost as quickly as browsing the song library. Video and Music are available from anywhere on your hard drive, pictures seem to be limited to the My Pictures folder (which is either an oversight or the easiest way to avoid having album art pollute the results). The photo feature appears to be limited to browsing in the beta, as editing tag info isn't supported and you can't rename any of the photos. We'll see what the final release brings, but this is a little half-baked at this point.

Improved Search

Search is dramatically enhanced with as-you-type result sets. WMP11 narrows your search on the fly based on what you type in the search box. iTunes had this functionality several versions ago, but Windows Media Player takes it too a new level by making the search blazing fast, even while viewing album art. Depending on which view of the player you start in, this might be across artists, albums or individual songs or within a subset of a particular artist or album. I have a few Windows Media Player search tips to make finding what you're looking for easier. One cool trick is performing a search and leaving out an entire genre from the results, so if you want to look for songs with the word "cry" in the title but don't want any Country songs, you simply type cry NOT Genre:Rap to filter results in a targeted way. This improved search comes at the price of the player using more memory, but if your machine has at least 1GB of RAM (which it should) you won't notice any performance difference. Here's another feature that needs further optimization before final release.

Music Store Enhancements

iTunes Music Store is the benchmark by which all online music stores are judged. With the launch of Windows Media Player 11 comes the new MTV URGE service, which is powered by Microsoft's Windows Media DRM and what seems to be the most robust backend in online music stores. The store supports both per-song purchases and the monthly subscription model we've seen from Napster and Yahoo. I setup the 14-day trial account with URGE and will likely sign up for the service when my trial expires because it works better than any other store at this point. One immediate differentiator is the sign in process actually works and doesn't time out the way Napster seems to do with great frequency. After creating an account, I started browsing tracks and got instant gratification in playing back any song or search result set of songs. Search functions in Windows Media Player 11 will indicate available tracks across both your local music library and across the entire database of MTV URGE, basically extending your personal library to include the entire universe of digital music, which is a great experience if you have the sudden impulse to hear a track from some faded memory. All of this adds up to something stronger than the iTMS experience because you're not limited to 30-second previews and 99-cent downloads of songs you only want to hear for a fleeting moment, and you're not restricted by drive storage because you've got MTV storing a massive online catalog for you.

Don't be confused by the MTV association, there's plenty of music for everyone. For instance, T-Bone Burnett, the guy behind many of the original tracks on Oh Brother Where Art Thou, has a new release prominently featured in the player as well as the latest from Buena Vista Social Club. If you browse by genre, the interface provides total potential listening hours, which translates to almost 10,000 hours for classical and 15,000 for jazz, in addition to the 30,000 hours of Rock.

The "I don't own it" argument doesn't hold water in my view because an always on subscription means you get both the albums your budget would afford you to purchase if you were buying CDs per album and the universe of music you might like to taste but can't because your disposable income creates a barrier to entry. Paying to listen to any song you want at any moment in time, whether it's the latest disposable pop star or a classic Miles Davis record. For me a subscription service is like having IMDB to track down movie stars - if someone tells me about music I can listen to it and understand what they are saying.

There are still a few quirks, like browsing the Billboard charts and getting a 30-second preview of songs instead of the whole track when signed in, but URGE already offers faster performance than any other store, including iTMS. Depending on which view you're in, it can be hard to tell whether files downloaded or not. The only other case against URGE is lack of support for iPods.

Final Impressions

Even in beta, Windows Media Player 11 is already ahead of previous versions. The music stores actually work the way you expect them to. Navigation makes more sense. Searching your music library is actually a joy, with visual searching making it faster to find exactly what you're looking for. There are moments when the interface lags in response to your clicks, features like photo browsing seem half-baked in their current form, but like previous versions of the player, there's still time for changes before the final version ships. I'm running the beta build on my primary machine and have no plans to revert back to WMP10 because I want the MTV URGE service and I like the search features. Even in beta this is by far the best version of Windows Media Player to date.

One thing Windows Media Player 11 finally supports is an effective search. As you search the results are narrowed quickly to albums, artists or songs specific to your search criteria, which eliminates the mess of digging through tracks. If you happen to subscribe to URGE and have a music library on your local computer, you get results from both. The search results look nice with stacked album art, but the important thing is getting results. In addition to basic searches, I've got a few tricks for getting better searches from large music libraries.

Find an Exact Phrase using Quotes which means a search for Madonna might return the Black Madonnas and Madonna, while searching for "Madonna" will return only Madonna.

Exclude Albums from an Artist search by typing either Aerosmith NOT "Toys in the Attic" or use a minus in place of NOT like this Aerosmith -"Toys in the Attic" to show all Aerosmith songs and albums except those found on Toys in the Attic.

Narrow a Search by Combining Search Terms using Aerosmith AND "Toys in the Attic" or use a plus sign in place of AND like this Aerosmith + "Toys in the Attic" to show only albums

Combine searches with OR to search for multiple tracks or terms. Say you want to find the version of Cars by both Gary Numan and the remake by Fear Factory. You could use the search query Cars Artist: "Gary Numan" OR Artist: "Fear Factory"

Note: Make sure when using modifiers like the above example Artist: to put a space between the colon and the start of your term or the search will fail in some cases (which I'm hoping will be fixed by final release).

Here's a list of all the search modifiers you can use to quickly narrow a search. Some seem very useful, like Album: or Title: or Genre: but who's really going to search for tracks with or without DRM?

With the December 4, 2007 update, Xbox 360 now directly supports streaming DivX AVI movies from your desktop. All you need is Windows Media Player 11 or the Zune software. I personally prefer Windows Media Player 11, because it also supports playing back Amazon Unbox videos on the Xbox 360.

Here's what you need to do to 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.