Free Media Player 10 Tutorial
If not already installed, download Microsoft's free Media Player 10 for Windows. Once downloaded go ahead and install this latest version on your machine and you are ready to go. This tutorial will provide quick start instructions on how to rip your music to the PC's harddisk and how to get the most from Media Player. Once you've installed Media Player 10 you are ready to fine tune it to your own preferences. First of all you will want to set the quality at wich you want to rip your cd collection to the PC's hard disk. To accomplish this click on Tools and then on Options in the Media Player menu. In the Options dialogue box select the Rip Music tab. In the Rip Settings section click on the Format dropdown list. From this list select "Windows Media Audio (Variable Bit Rate)". Then drag the Audio Quality slider completely to the right for best quality recording. You may of course choose different settings, but this mentioned settings will provide for very high quality audio ripping. Should you need to play the audio on a portable device, you may always later use a conversion utility to convert it to another format or a lower bit rate for smaller files. Just to give you an idea of how much space this will take up on your PC's harddisk, 50 CD's at this recording quality will take up slightly less than 7GB of space on the harddisk. Pop the first cd into one of the cd drives and click on the Rip tab in Media Player. The next step is to click on "Find Album Info", but keep in mind that the PC must be connected to the Internet before proceeding to this step. Media Player will try to locate the Album info. If you are not happy with the displayed info click on the Edit button. Make any required changes. Note that you can also add info about the Performer and Composer. If fields for this headings is not availabe click on Performer and Composer respectively. Once all required information is provided click on the Next button. Finally click on the Finish button to submit this information to Windows Media and supply the Album info to Windows Media Player. The only step that is left is to rip the music. To do this click on "Rip Music". Repeat the procedure in above paragraph for all the cd's you want to rip to your PC harddisk. To locate any music click on Media Player's Library tab. Here you can choose which music to play by selecting from album artists, composer, album, genre, year released, rated songs and purchased music. You may also want to make use of Media Player's advanced features. One I find particularly useful is "Auto Volume Leveling". After ripping a few cd's and setting up playing lists or just playing the songs randomly, I found the volume of the music from different albums varied quite a lot and this caused some songs to play to loud and others to be to soft again. After a short while this might get irritating, but you do not have live with this as Windows Media Player provide advanced tools to efficiently deal with this problem. To set this up click on the Now Playing tab in Media Player. Then click on View | Enhancements | Crossfading and Auto Volume Leveling. Finally click on "Turn on auto volume leveling". If you want to disable this feature again click on "Turn off auto volume leveling". If auto volume leveling is turned on it will still function even if you hide the Enhancements. You may want to spice up your Media Player experience so go and grab some extraordinary Windows Media Player plug-ins and Windows Media Player Skins at www.wmplugins.com. For mp3 related info you can visit MP3-Music-Player-Info.com
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