Chapter 19: Working with Sound

Playing Sound Files with Windows Media Player

Another program that can play sound files, and many other types of files, is Windows Media Player, recently updated to version 8.0 and touting some new features. Start Windows Media Player by choosing Start | Windows Media Player (if the program appears on the left side of the Start menu, as it does when you first install Windows), choosing Start | All Programs | Windows Media Player, or clicking the Windows Media Player icon on the Quick Launch toolbar (if it appears on your taskbar). You see the Windows Media Player window shown in Figure 19-9. When it starts, no image appears on its "video screen" (the gray box in the middle of its window).

Figure 19-9: The Windows Media Player window

Strangely, the program doesn't update its video screen until a file is loaded, and the video screen might end up displaying bits and pieces of the windows and dialog boxes that you have displayed in that area. Don't worry--the Windows Media Player program is fine.

To play a sound file, choose File | Open, set the Files Of Type box to Audio File (to skip other types of files, such as video files), choose a file, and click Open. Windows Media Player loads the file and starts playing it. When it's over, you can click the Play button in the lower-left corner of the Windows Media Player window to play the sound file again.You can stop playback by clicking the Stop button near the bottom of the window.

See the section "Playing Video Files with Windows Media Player" in the next chapter for details about playing video files with Windows Media Player.

The Windows Media Player Window

The program has buttons on the left, top, and bottom of the Windows Media Player window. The area in the center of the window is the "video screen" on which videos and other pictures appear. You can also choose to display other information on the video screen. Playlists or lists of Internet radio stations may appear on the right side of the window.

Windows Media Player has its own toolbar that runs down the side of the window. (The program calls this the Features Taskbar, but we reserve the term "taskbar" for the Windows taskbar.) If the Windows Media Player window isn't tall enough to display all the buttons, double-chevron buttons appear at the top and bottom of the toolbar so that you can scroll the toolbar buttons up and down. You can hide the toolbar by clicking the tiny left-pointing arrow button in the middle of the right side of the toolbar.

The toolbar contains these buttons:

• Now Playing Displays the currently loaded file. If the file is a video, it appears on the video screen. If an audio file is loaded, you see a visualization of the music.

• Media Guide Connects to the Windows Media Web site over the Internet, from which you can view video files content that is updated on a daily basis.

• Copy From CD Plays sounds from an audio CD inserted in your CD-ROM drive.

• Media Library Enables you to organize your audio and video files.

• Radio Tuner Plays Internet radio stations--that is, radio stations that are available over the Internet as streaming audio files.

• Copy To CD Or Device Enables you to move audio files to and from a portable audio player or create audio CDs.

• Skin Chooser Enables you to choose a different look (appearance and controls) for the program.

Windows Media Player has an Auto Update feature that tells you when updates to the program are available from Microsoft over the Internet. When you exit Windows Media Player, a dialog box may appear offering to download and install updates. Read the information about the update and decide whether you want it. You can check for updates any time you are online by choosing Help | Check For Player Updates from the menu bar.

Playing Audio Files Stored on Your Computer

To play a file on your computer or on a shared drive on a LAN, choose File | Open and choose the filename. (If you don't see the menu bar, click the Show/Auto-hide Menu Bar button above the upper left corner of the video screen part of the Windows Media Player window.) Windows Media Player can play sound files in a variety of formats, including WAV, MIDI, and streaming audio files.

Click the Now Playing button on the toolbar to see the video that goes with the audio. If the file you are playing doesn't include video images, Windows Media Player creates them for you. As the music plays, the video screen shows visualizations, graphical representations of the sound. Forty-six kinds of visualizations come with Windows Media Player--all are interesting, and some are positively mesmerizing. You can change the visualization that appears by clicking the small gray arrow buttons underneath the visualization. The name of the visualization appears to the right of the buttons. You can also surf through them all by choosing View | Visualizations from the menu, selecting the name of a group of visualizations, and choosing the specific visualization.

You can remove visualizations that you never watch, change the properties of some visualizations, or add new visualizations that you download from the Internet. Choose Tools | Options from the menu and click the Visualizations tab to display a list of the available visualizations.

You can add other information to the video screen by using three buttons that always appear along the top of the Windows Media Player window (we list them as they appear from left to right):

• Turn Shuffle On/Off Click this to tell Windows Media Player whether to play the available tracks randomly (on) or in order of appearance (off).
• Show/Hide Equalizer And Settings In Now Playing Displays controls along the bottom of the video screen when Now Playing is selected.
• Show/Hide Playlist In Now Playing Displays your current playlist down the right side of the Windows Media Player window.

Organizing Your Audio Files into a Media Library

Windows Media Player includes the Media Library, a storehouse for all of your audio and video files (Figure 19-10). To organize your audio and video files (also called tracks, as on an audio CD), Windows Media Player can search your drives (local and shared network drives) for files. It organizes them into lists of audio files, video files, and the addresses of radio stations on the Internet. You can then organize the files into playlists, described in the next section.

The first time you click the Media Library button, Windows Media Player offers to perform the search, or you can follow these steps at any time:

Figure 19-10: Playlists of audio files in the Media Library

1. Choose Tools | Search For Media Files from the menu (or press F3). You see the Search For Media Files dialog box:

2. In the Search Options section, specify whether to search Local Drives (disk drives on your own computer), Network Drives (shared drives on a LAN), All Drives, or a list of individual drive letters. If you select a specific drive by drive letter, you can choose a folder to start in (the program searches only that folder and its subfolders).
3. Click the Advanced button to display the Advanced Search Options section of the dialog box.
4. The previous version of Windows Media Player had the annoying habit of including the small sound event files that come with Windows. Now you can specify that small files be skipped and not added to your media library--just leave the Skip Audio Files Smaller Than xx KB settings large enough to skip the small "beep" and "ding" event sounds (256KB, the default, works fine).
5. Unless you want to include the audio files that come with Windows (unlikely, if you are making a catalog of music files), leave the Include System Folders check box deselected.
6. Click Search. A dialog box appears telling you the progress of the search. When it has finished, it tells you how many files it found. Click Close.
7. Click Close again to dismiss the Search For Media Files dialog box
8. Click the Media Library button (if it's not already selected) to see all your audio and video files.

The list on the left shows the files by category, and the list on the right shows the contents of the selected category. The five major categories are Audio, Video (described in the next chapter), My Playlists (described in the next section), Radio Tuner Presets (for Internet radio stations, described in the section "Listening to Internet Radio Stations" later in this chapter), and Deleted Items. The Audio category lists these subcategories:

• All Audio Displays all audio files in alphabetical order, no matter where they are stored.
• Album Displays audio files by the album of which they are a part (if any). Windows Media Player identifies albums by information from audio CDs (see the next section) or from the MP3 ID3 tags, for MP3 format files.
• Artist Displays audio files by artist. If you have songs from more than one album by a single artist, the albums appear as sub-subcategories.
• Genre Displays audio files by genres and styles. Since genres and styles are primarily determined by personal taste (ever argue with someone as to whether Steely Dan is jazz, rock, or progressive?), this can be an unreliable way to sort music--unless you go through each album and assign each album to the genre where you think it belongs.

You can click a file to play it and the files that follow it on the list. Windows Media Player can keep track of lots of information about each file--use the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the list of files to see the title, artist, computer, genre, length, file size, file format (type), creation date, file pathname, and other items. To see more information about a file, right-click it and choose Properties from the menu that appears. If you don't want a file to appear anywhere in your Media Library, right-click it and choose Delete From Library from the shortcut menu that appears.

You can also update the information about a file. Right-click a piece of information about a file and choose Edit. Windows Media Player enables you to edit the field you clicked (this feature doesn't work on all fields). You can also make the same change to the information about a group of files (for example, change the Genre of a group of files). Select a group of files, click a field (like Artist or Genre), choose Edit Selected, edit the text, and press ENTER. Windows Media Player makes the change to all the files you selected.

You can also click the Search button along the top of the video screen to search for a field by a word or phrase in its title, as shown here:

Click the Media Details button along the top of the video screen to ask Windows Media Player to get details, if any, about the selected file.

You can configure other Media Library settings. Choose Tools | Options from the menu and click the Media Library tab to set them:

• Access Rights Of Other Applications Sets the level of access other programs have to your Media Library and playlist information.
• Access Rights Of Internet Sites Sets the level of access that Web sites have to your Media Library and playlist information.
• Media Files If you uncheck this check box, Windows Media Player asks whether you want the program to manage that media or not. This setting is only useful if you use other digital media applications, such as Liquid Audio.

Creating and Editing Playlists

A playlist is a set of audio files that you plan to play as a group. You can create a playlist, give it a name, and put audio (or video) files into it. Then you can play that group of files any time, either in the order in which they appear on the playlist or in random (shuffled) order.

Click the Media Library button on the toolbar to see, create, and edit playlists. In the list of categories on the left side of the video screen, one category is My Playlists. Windows comes with one playlist, named Sample Playlist, which contains several audio files.

To create a new playlist, click the New Playlist button at the top of the video screen area. Type a name for the new playlist and click OK. Windows Media Player adds your new playlist to the My Playlists category.

You can add files to a playlist in several ways:

• Click the Add To Playlist button at the top left of the video screen when the Media Library button is selected. You see a menu of your playlists.
• Click the unlabeled Add To Playlist button at the top right of the video screen (the one with a plus sign). You can choose among adding a file from your computer, adding a file from the Internet, or (if you are playing a CD) adding a file from the CD.
• Right-click a file (or select a group of files and right-click it), and choose Add To Playlist from the shortcut menu that appears.
• Drag the file (or files) to the name of the playlist in the My Playlists category on the left side of the video screen when Media Library is selected.

When you add a file to a playlist, Windows Media Player doesn't copy the file to the playlist--the audio file remains where it is stored. Instead, it creates a shortcut to the file. This capability allows you to include one file in many playlists. When you delete a file from a playlist, Windows doesn't delete the audio file; it just deletes the shortcut to the file from the playlist. To delete a file from a playlist, right-click the file and choose Delete From Playlist from the shortcut menu that appears (or click the Delete Media From Playlist Or Library button along the right top of the video screen).

You can adjust the order of the files in the playlist by dragging them up and down the list. Or, select a file and click either the Moves The Media Up In The Playlist button or the Moves The Media Down In The Playlist button along the right top of the video screen. Click the Turn Shuffle On button along the top of the Windows Media Player window to play the files in random order.

You can also save your playlists in files in various formats, including the uncommon Windows Media types (with extensions .asx, .wax, and .wvx), as well as the ubiquitous WinAmp format (.m3u). To export a playlist, do the following:

1. Click the Media Library button.
2. Click the My Playlists item to show your available playlists on the right.
3. Select a playlist.
4. Choose File | Export Playlist To File to open the Save As dialog box.
5. Type a name for the file in the Save As box.
6. Add one of the file extensions to have it saved as a particular type (usually .m3u).
7. Click Save.

To play a playlist you've heard recently, choose it from the drop-down list in the upper-right corner of the Windows Media Player window.

Playing Audio CDs

Every audio CD has a serial number that identifies the artist, album title, and the list of tracks (songs) on the CD. These serial numbers are stored in a database called the Compact Disc Database or CDDB, which is accessible over the Internet. The CDDB began as a cooperative effort of the community of music lovers, entering information about their CDs, but has since become a commercial venture.

When you insert an audio CD into your CD-ROM drive, the Windows Media Player program runs automatically. If AutoPlay is turned on, the music begins playing. Windows Media Player reads the number from the audio CD and sends that number to the CDDB over the Internet. If the audio CD number is in the CDDB, the list of songs and artists is usually already in the CDDB, unless you have a truly obscure album. Windows Media Player downloads this information to your computer automatically. The list of tracks appears in the playlist that appears when you click the Now Playing or CD Audio button. If the CD is not in the CDDB database, then you have the option to type the titles of the tracks in yourself (do so--as a public service).

To play a specific track, double-click a song title, right-click a song title and select Play; or select the song title and click the Play button at the bottom of the window. You can edit the information about a CD track the same way you edit information about a track in a playlist: right-click information about the track and choose Edit from the shortcut menu that appears; or, select a group of tracks, right-click the information about one track, and choose Edit Selected to make the same change to all the selected tracks. For more information about a track, right-click it and choose Properties.

You can change the order in which Windows Media Player plays the tracks on the CD. Right-click a track and choose Move Up or Move Down from the shortcut menu, or simply drag them up or down with the mouse. A gray line tracks your movement, indicating where the track will be placed when you let go. Click the Shuffle button along the top of the Windows Media Player window to play the files in random order. (The check boxes to the left of the tracks are used for selecting tracks when copying a CD; they don't affect which tracks Windows Media Player plays.)

When you are playing an audio CD and you click the the Copy From CD button on the toolbar, these buttons appear across the top of the video screen:

• Copy Music Copies the selected tracks to the Windows Media (WMA) digital format at 128 Kbs (a format that includes most of what the human ear can discern from digital music, but is far more compact than purely raw audio data). By default, the program copies the files to a new folder in your My Music folder, where you can play them later. Copying tracks from a CD can take a while, but Windows Media Player can continue to play the CD while it's copying: click the Stop Copying button to interrupt copying. Windows Media Player automatically includes these new files in your Media Library.
• Get Names Checks the CDDB to see whether your CD is in the database. If there is only one match, Windows Media Player downloads the list and stores it for reuse later. If there is more than one match, you see a list of the located matches in the lower part of the Windows Media Player window and you can select the best one. If the CD doesn't appear in the database, Windows Media Player asks if you would like to contribute that data to the database for others to see.
• Album Details Displays a comprehensive look at the particular title you have in your CD-ROM drive, if available. You may see an album cover, a list of songs, and possibly even a review. Click the Hide Details button to remove this information from the window.

To see a visualization of the music, click the Now Playing button and choose a visualization.

Windows Media Player includes several configuration settings for audio CDs. Choose Tools | Options, click the Devices tab, select your CD drive from the list, and click Properties to control how audio CDs play. (Click the Show Menu Bar button above the upper-left corner of the video screen if the menu bar doesn't appear.) The Audio tab shows these settings:

• Playback If your CD-ROM drive supports it, select Digital for a clearer sound. You can also turn on error correction, which increases the amount of RAM used to buffer the audio data.
• Copy For some CD-ROM drives, you can set the quality level that you want to use when copying music from CDs to your hard disk--the higher the quality, the bigger the file.

If you have a CD-R or CD-R/RW drive on your system (either the only CD drive or in addition to a CD-ROM or DVD), its Properties dialog box includes a Recording tab where you can control the new Windows XP CD burning capabilities. On the Recording tab are these settings:

• Enable CD Recording On This Drive Governs whether you can use the drive to create CDs or not. This option is purely subjective, because if the drive were not capable of recording, then the Recording tab would not have appeared in the first place.
• Drive Selection Allows users with multiple disks to select which disk Windows Media Player uses to store a copy of the CD to be written before actually writing it.
• Speed Selection Controls how quickly Windows can write to the drive. You can't select a speed that is faster than your drive actually supports. If you are using older CD blanks that support only slower speeds and you have trouble getting CDs that play well, burn the CDs at a slower speed than the drive is capable of handling.
• Automatically Eject The CD After Writing Most CD burning software does this by default, with exception of WinOnCD.

Using Another Audio Player The first time you insert an audio CD into your CD-ROM drive, you may see a dialog box like this: You can decide whether to use Windows Media Player or another program to play your audio CDs.

Playing Streaming Audio Files from the Internet

If you know the exact URL of an audio file on the Internet, choose File | Open Location and enter the URL of the file to play it. However, it's usually easier to use the Media Guide button to help you find the file you want.

When you click the Media Guide button, the program connects to Microsoft's Windows Media site at http://www.windowsmedia.com. This site, as shown in Figure 19-11, usually has to do with television, movies, or new music, and often has neat stuff to look at or listen to.

Figure 19-11: Microsoft's Media Guide Web site

Windows Media Player's Media Guide feature acts like a Web browser to show you the Windows Media home page, which you can also view with Internet Explorer. The pages have Back and Forward links in the upper-right corner of the display that allow you to move about with a modicum of the ease you get in your Web browser. Some links may display pages in your browser rather than on the Windows Media Player's video screen.

If your PC connects to the Internet through a firewall, you might not be able to use Windows Media Player's Media Guide or Radio Tuner buttons. The port numbers used when connecting to streaming audio material on Web sites aren't standard, and the system that connects your LAN to the Internet might not be configured to handle them. If you have a problem, choose Tools | Options to display the Options dialog box. The Network tab controls how the program communicates over the Internet:

• Protocols Defines which network access protocols the program uses to communicate with servers and (optionally) which ports to use (useful if you communicate with the Internet through a firewall).
• Proxy Settings Specifies whether your PC communicates with the Internet over a LAN, using a proxy server program. The default is not to use a proxy server. If your PC connects to the Internet over a LAN, get the configuration information from your LAN administrator.

Listening to Internet Radio Stations

Many radio stations use the Internet to broadcast their signal to parts of the world that their antennas could never reach. In addition to large-scale commercial stations, hundreds of little operations are cropping up (although some have had to stop broadcasting due to issues of artist royalties). Window Media Player brings all of the stations that use the Windows Media streaming technology to you in the form of a searchable database.

An example of Internet radio on a small scale is radioIO (at http://www.radioio.com), where a single person handles all aspects of the operation of one streaming station. On the other end of the scale is Live365 (at http://www.live365.com) which has 100 streaming stations all going at the same time. Both are professionally programmed radio stations.

To listen to Internet radio, click the Radio Tuner button. Windows Media Player shows the list of presets and radio stations shown in Figure 19-12. You see information from the WindowsMedia.com Web site.

Figure 19-12: Tuning in to Internet radio stations

The left side of the video screen lists your preset stations (these stations also appear when you click the Media Library button in the Radio Tuner Presets category). A number of presets are already there, but you can remove or edit them. Those presets appear in the Featured Stations preset list. Click an entry to see your options: Add To My Stations (that is, to your My Stations preset list), Visit Website (the radio station's Web site), or Play. You can make your own preset list using My Stations.

To find stations that aren't on a preset list, click Find More Stations. Set the Browse By Genre box to a category, or type a name or keyword into the Search box and click the arrow button to its right.You can also search by ZIP code to find stations in your area. Windows Media Player searches for stations that match. The stations that Windows Media Player finds appear in the Search Results list. To listen to a station, click it and click Play. You may have to wait a minute or two until the music (or talk) begins. You may see a dialog box asking whether to install a downloaded codec (compressing and decompressing schemes).

If you like a radio station, you can add it to your My Stations lists. Highlight the station and click the Add To My Stations button.

Two configuration settings affect the quality of streaming files from the Internet. Choose Tools | Options and click the Performance tab to set them:

• Connection Speed You can either let Windows Media Player detect the speed at which your computer communicates with the Internet, or, if you know for sure, you can set it yourself.
• Network Buffering Defines how much data is stored in RAM before it actually plays. If you have trouble with getting smooth playback, click the Buffer radio button and put up to 60 seconds in the field (30 to 45 seconds is typically adequate).
• Video Acceleration Allows you to set how much of the video rendering is performed by your video card. Cryptically advanced controls and options are available by clicking the Advanced button, but we do not recommend altering anything unless specified by a technical support agent or other experienced source.

Adjusting Volume, Graphic Equalization, and Other Sound Settings

If you want to adjust how your audio files sound, click the Show Equalizer And Settings In Now Playing button at the top of the Windows Media Player window and then click the Now Playing button. The equalizer and settings appear in the bottom part of the video screen. Click the Show Equalizer And Settings In Now Playing button again to remove these tools from the screen. You can also start or stop displaying these tools by choosing View | Now Playing Tools from the menu, and choosing the tool.

Several sets of tools can appear in this area. The gray menu button in the lower-left corner of the area selects which of the following tools appears.

• SRS WOW Effects Includes several special effects: TruBass, WOW Effect, SRS WOW Effect, and Speakers. TruBass adds more bass to your music the farther to the right you slide it. WOW Effect adds more separation between the stereo channels. The On/Off button enables or disables all these effects. Clicking the SRS logo takes your Web browser to the SRS Technologies Web site at http://www.srstechnologies.com, in case you are interested in files that use the SRS WOW technology. The Speakers button switches among Normal Speakers, Large Speakers, and Headphones.
• Graphic Equalizer Enables you to adjust the treble and bass balance, and left and right speaker balance. The ten vertical sliders adjust the volume of the high treble notes (at the right end) through the low bass notes (at the left end). The On/Off button enables or disables the effects of any modifications you make to the equalizer. Turning it off means you get the sound exactly as it was recorded. Rather than setting them individually, you can click the button below the On/Off button, which cycles through preset bass/treble settings that work for many common musical genres. The Balance slider adjusts the relative volume of the left and right speakers. If you like to adjust the equalizer yourself, the three buttons on the left end of the controls define whether you can adjust each frequency individually, adjust them in a loose group, or adjust them in a tight group.

• Video Settings Enables you to control the color and brightness of the video images.
• Media Information Displays any information that the program can glean about tracks or albums you are listening to. If it's available, it even shows a picture of the album cover. When you are playing MP3 files downloaded from the Internet, no information appears.

MP3 files have their own way of identifying the file's contents to MP3 players. They are called ID3 tags, and they embed the information about artist, album, title, length, genre, track number, and notes.

• Captions Displays captions, if the file includes them.
• Lyrics Displays song lyrics if the file includes them or if they are available via the CDDB.
• DVD Controls Displays the other controls that Windows Media Player needs if you are playing a DVD. These additional controls include the Variable Play Speed slider, Rewind, Play, Fast Forward, and Next Frame buttons. Even more controls are available during playback by right-clicking the video.

Moving Files to and from Portable Players and Other Devices

Portable MP3 players and personal CD players are quite popular, as are handheld devices that can play music, like PocketPCs. The portable digital music machines of today are small and can hold a few hours worth of digital music (in the case of the Sony MC-P10 Music Clip). Others can play up to 100 hours and take up no more room than a portable CD player (for example, the Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox comes with a 6GB hard disk). A number of portable CD players can play CD-R and CD-RW media in either White Book format (the same as a standard audio CD) or MP3 files.

Some portable CD players can play CD-R/RW discs only if they were burned in the same format as standard audio CDs. Others have the ability to see and playback MP3 and WMA files from a CD-R/RW. A typical 640MB or 700MB CD-R can hold much more music than a 74- or 80-minute audio CD. For example, the average audio CD recorded at 128Kbps takes up 60- to 80MBs of space. That means that a 700MB CD-R can hold an average of 10 complete CDs.

It's easy to copy music from your PC to a portable device or CD-R by using Windows Media Player. Here's how:

1. Make playlists of all the music you want to copy.
2. Click the Copy To CD Or Device button. The tracks on a playlist appear on the left side (Music To Copy). If you are using a portable device, any tracks appear on the right side (Music On Device). Otherwise, the CD burner appears, indicated by drive letter.
3. Select which files will be copied by checking or unchecking the tracks on the Music To Copy list. If no tracks appear, choose or create a playlist.
4. When you have selected all of the tracks to copy and they do not exceed the storage capacity of your device or CD-R, click the Copy Music button in the upper-left corner of the window.

The serial connections with which many portable music players connect to the PC are slow, but many portable music players come with USB connections that are much faster. CD recording is limited by the speed at which your drive can operate. This is not to say that if you can playback CDs at 40x that you will be able to record at that speed. Typical speeds are from 2x to 12x, and slower for rewriting.

You can control how Windows Media Player copies files to portable players--choose Tools | Options and click the Device tab of the Options dialog box to see a listing of your devices. If a device you have does not appear then it is either not supported or not installed.

Licensing Issues for Digital Music In order to protect music transferred from audio CDs or the Internet from being copied, Microsoft has integrated some protection features which prevent you from copying unsigned files to a portable device. A file is signed if you copied the music from an audio CD using Windows Media Player. When you copy music from an audio CD, Windows Media Player assumes that the music is licensed to you to use at your discretion (as long and you don't resell it or otherwise misrepresent the media to the general public). All files that you copy are encoded in Microsoft's proprietary .wma format by default, so you need a device that can play them (a PocketPC, WinJam, or other digital music systems) You can also get signed music files by buying and downloading them from the Windows Media Web site. You are fairly safe from getting improperly licensed music from unknown online sources as long as you patronize the Windows Media Web site (and maybe a few select partners). Any music purchased through the Windows Media site or from one of its partners is likely to be properly licensed.

Customizing the Windows Media Player Window

WinAmp, a popular shareware MP3 player, popularized the ability to skin an application--that is, offer a variety of user interfaces so that you can choose among a number of window, menu, and button designs (or even create your own). In a complete turnaround from Microsoft's typical functional look, the company had integrated skins into Windows Media Player. Full mode has only a single look; but in Skin mode, customization can run rampant.

When you run Windows Media Player, it appears in Full mode, with all the buttons and controls we've described so far. The other option is Skin mode, in which you see one of the included skins.

To switch from Full mode to Skin mode, click the Switch To Skin Mode button that appears at the right end of the Seek slider. How the Windows Media Player window looks depends on which skin you chose. You usually see something like this:

Changing skins changes the locations of all the controls and the overall appearance of Windows Media Player, often drastically. Don't try changing the program's skins until you feel confident with the application as a whole. If you do get stuck, click the large Windows Media logo button that appears in a floating window, and choose Switch To Full Mode from the menu that appears:

To switch to another skin:

1. Click the Skin Chooser button on the toolbar down the left side of the window. In the video screen, you see two lists: on the left is a list of available skins and on the right is a picture of the selected skin (see Figure 19-13).

Figure 19-13: Choosing a different skin for Windows Media Player

2. Select a skin name from the list on the left side. An image appears in the right pane showing you what the skin really looks like.
3. Click the Apply Skin button at the top of the list to activate the skin and switch to Skin mode. If you want to change skins without changing modes, just leave the new skin selected and click a different button on the toolbar.

You can get more skins from the Windows Media Web site at any time. Skins are stored in files with the extension .wmz in the C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\Skins folder (assuming that Windows is installed on C:). Click the More Skins button at the top of the list and your Web browser goes to a set of pages on the Microsoft Windowsmedia.com Web site. When you click the picture showing the skin, Windows Media Player downloads it and asks if you would like to activate your new skin now.

Switching back from a new skin can be trickier, since the new controls may be unrecognizable. Hover your mouse pointer over anything that looks like it might be a button until you find one with the label Return To Full Mode. If nothing appears familiar or your hover search reveals no clues, you may also right-click anywhere on the skin and select Full Mode from the menu that appears.

Some skins consume lots of memory. If your computer's performance slows when you are using Windows Media Player, switch back to the default skin.

You can configure Windows Media Player by choosing Tools | Options to display the Options dialog box. The Player tab of the Options dialog box controls the program itself:

• Automatic Updates Specifies how often you want Windows Media Player to check the Microsoft Web site for updates. You can also enable or disable automatic codec downloads.
• Internet Settings Controls whether your player is individually recognized on the Internet and whether to get media licenses. The first option allows Web sites to store something like a media cookie on your PC.
• Player Settings Specifies how Windows Media Player looks when it starts.

Specifying Which File Formats Windows Media Player Plays

You can choose which file formats Windows Media Player plays (which file formats the program is associated with). Choose Tools | Options from the Windows Media Player menu bar and click the File Types tab to see a list of audio and video file formats. If you want another program to play files of a specific format, uncheck the check box for that format. If you can't live without Windows Media Player, click the Select All button to make it the default player for practically everything.

How Windows Handles Speech Text-to-speech (TTS) enables the computer to speak text out loud. Conversely, speech recognition (SR) enables the computer to convert the sound of speech into text stored in the computer. Windows has built-in configuration settings that TTS and SR applications can use. Microsoft Narrator uses these settings to do text-to-speech. For speech recognition, you need to install an additional program, many of which are listed on Microsoft's Third Party Products page at http://microsoft.com/speech/thirdparty. To see the speech settings, choose Start | Control Panel, click Sounds, Speech, And Audio Devices, and click Speech. You see the the Speech Properties dialog box shown in Figure 19-14. You can choose a voice (Windows comes only with Microsoft Sam, who sounds rather robotic) and speed. Figure 19-14: The Speech Properties dialog box Microsoft is developing handwriting recognition software one language at a time. To check whether your language is supported, choose Start | Control Panel and click Date, Time, Language, And Regional Settings. Then click Regional And Language Options to display the Regional And Language Options dialog box. Click the Details button on the Languages tab and click your language on the list of installed languages. Click the Add button and see whether Handwriting Recognition is listed as an option.