Using Media Player 12 Features Guide
Using Media Player 12 Features Guide
Explorer Media Player 12 Guide
(new windows 7 media player)
(Read Window 7 Tips, Windows Media Player 12 Tips)
As you keep reading windows media player 12 useful guide to explorer the new media player 12, we continue to describe more about features below:
How Automatically renaming songs in Media Player 12 Library:
As you learned how you could control filenames of songs you rip (copy) from CDs. Those filenames don’t have a big impact on how information shows up in your library. The media information from each song actually comes from properties in the file rather than the filename. Nonetheless, it never hurts to have some consistency in your filenames.
For example, suppose you ripped a bunch of CDs before you realized you could control how the filenames of those songs are formatted. You change the rip settings to something you like better. That change won’t affect songs you’ve already ripped; it will only affect songs that you rip after changing the setting. You can, however, get Media Player to rename previously named songs according to your new settings. Here’s how:
- Click Organize and choose Options.
- On the Library tab, choose Rename Music Files using Rip Music Settings.
- Optionally, if you also want to have the songs rearranged in your rip music folder (typically the Music folder in your user account), choose Rearrange Music in Rip Music Folder Using Rip Music Settings.
- Click OK after making your selections.
- To apply changes, click Organize and choose Apply Media Information Changes.
It may take a while to update and rearrange all the songs in your rip music folder. When the change is complete, click the Close button that appears in the progress indicator. You may not notice any changes in Media Player’s library, but you likely will notice changes when you open your rip music folder outside of Media Player.
Most of the options and settings discussed so far have to do with groups of songs and things the Media Player does on its own. No matter what settings you choose, there may be times when you need to manually edit (or remove) items in your library.
In some cases, you may need to change a single song title. For example, suppose you have songs named Track1, Track2, Track3, and so forth. You’ve already tried updating that information through techniques described earlier, but the song titles still don’t appear because the song titles aren’t available online. When that happens, you’ll need to manually change the media information.
When changing a song title, you’ll want to work with one song at a time. In other cases, such as when changing a genre or artist name, you may want to make the same change to several songs at once. To make the same change to multiple songs in your library, you first have to select the songs you want to change. So before talking about manually editing songs, let’s look at techniques for selecting the songs you want to change.
Selecting in Media Library (Windows Media Player 12 Tips):
Your media library isn’t set in stone. You can change the information you see at any time. Typically you just right-click the thing you want to change and choose Edit to change it or Delete to remove it. I’ll get to the specifics in a moment. But first let’s talk about selecting items in the library. Selecting two or more items allows you to make the same change to all those selected items in one fell swoop.
Selecting items in media player 12 Media Library is much like selecting icons in folders, so if you already know how to do that you’re ahead of the game. You can select items in any view, but you might find it easiest to work in the Details view. For example, click Music in the Navigation pane at the left side of the window. Then choose Details from the View Options button. Finally, click whatever column heading arranges the songs in a way that groups them in whatever way is easiest for you to work with at the moment.
One way to select all the items in a group is to click the heading that precedes the group. For example, I clicked the artist name Joe Cocker to select all the songs under that category. The selected songs are highlighted. Any change you make to one of the selected songs is applied to all the selected songs.
Another way to select multiple adjacent songs is to click the first one you want to select. Then hold down the Shift key and click the last one you want to select. The two songs you clicked and all the songs in between are selected.
To select multiple songs that aren’t adjacent to one another, click the first one that you want to select. Then hold down the Ctrl key while clicking other songs you want to select. That same technique lets you unselect one selected song without unselecting any other songs.
Media Player 12 Tips
You can also use these keyboard to select songs, in media player 12:
- To select every song in the library, click Songs in the Navigation pane, click a song title, and press Ctrl+A.
- To select all the songs from the current song to the bottom of the list, click the first song you want to select and press Shift+End.
- To select all the songs to the top of the list, click the first song and press Shift+Home.
- To deselect songs, click a neutral area in the program window, such as the empty space to the left of the play controls.
Selecting songs doesn’t have any effect on them, other than to highlight them. However, any action you take while the songs are selected is applied to all of the selected songs. The following sections look at things you can do with any one song or any number of selected songs.
Changing a song title (Media Player 12 Tips)
Every song on a CD is likely to have its own unique title, so you generally have to change titles one at a time. To change just one song title, first make sure you don’t have multiple songs selected. (Click the song you want to change so that only that song it selected.) Then right-click the title you want to change and choose Edit. Type the new title and press Enter.
Changing genre, artist, and such (Media Player 12 Tips)
You can change the genre, artist, album title, or any other media information for a song by right-clicking in a specific column and choosing Edit. But because all the songs on a CD may have that same artist, or belong to the same genre, you might want to make the change to several songs. First select all the songs to which you want to apply the change. Then click the word or name you want to change in any one of the selected songs and choose Edit. Type in the new name or word and press Enter. The change will occur in all the selected songs.
Changing incorrect media information (Media Player 12 Tips)
Sometimes Media Player will get media information from the Internet, but it’s the wrong information. This is especially true when working with multiple CD sets. Rather than manually typing all the information for the CD, you can take a shot at finding the correct information online. To do so, click Album in the Navigation pane. Then scroll to the album that has the incorrect icon, right-click its icon, and choose Update Album Info. Then double-click the album’s icon to see whether the situation has improved at all.
If updating the album info didn’t help, you can try right-clicking the album title just above its song titles and choosing Find Album Info. Most likely you’ll get the same faulty information you got the first time. But you can click the Search button in the lower-left corner of the Album Info window that opens and try searching by the artist’s name or album title. You may get lucky and find the exact album you’re looking for. The Album Info window acts like a wizard, so you can just follow the instructions on the screen and use the buttons along the bottom of the window to aid in your search.
If you do find the exact album you’re looking for, click the Finish button in the Album Info window and Media Player will copy the media information to the album in your media library. If you don’t have any such luck, you can still manually enter the correct information for each song on the album using the techniques described in the previous sections.
Rating songs (Media Player 12 Tips)
You’ve probably noticed the star ratings that Media Player adds to each song. By default, the ratings are all the same (three stars) because the idea is for you to rate each song according to your own likes and dislikes. Give five stars to your favorite songs, one star to songs you don’t like, and something in between for all the rest.
To change the rating of a single song, right-click the title of the song you want to rate, choose Rate, and enter the number of stars you want to give it. To rate multiple songs, first decide what rating
you want to apply (such as five stars). Then select all the songs to which you want to apply that rating. (You can use the Ctrl+Click method to select multiple non-adjacent songs.) After you’ve selected all the songs to which you want to apply a rating, right-click any selected song, choose Rate, and choose the desired rating.
Any time you want to view all the songs to which you’ve applied a rating, click Organize O Sort By O Rating. The contents pane in the center of the program window will show rating categories; one category for ratings you’ve applied and another for songs you haven’t rated yet but were given ratings automatically.
To play all the songs to which you’ve given a certain rating, right-click the rating icon and choose Play. To see all the songs to which you’ve applied a given rating, double-click the rating icon.