In This Chapter

Playing music, video, and CDs

Creating, saving, and editing playlists

Copying CDs to your hard drive or another disc

Built for minimalists, the Windows 10 Music app sticks to the essentials. With a few clicks, it plays music stored both on your computer and OneDrive. If you pay a monthly fee for Microsoft’s Groove Music Pass, you can listen to Internet radio stations based around your favorite artist.

Unfortunately, that’s about it. Stuck in a world of digital files, the Music app can’t copy music CDs onto your computer. It can’t create CDs from your music files. It can’t even play a music CD you’ve slipped into your PC’s disc drive.

And that’s just fine for Windows tablets and many laptops — they don’t have a disc drives. Most tablet owners just want to hear a few favorite songs or albums.

On a desktop PC, however, you probably want to stick with the program from yesteryear, Windows Media Player. Windows Media Player works much like it did in earlier Windows versions with one big exception: It can no longer play DVDs.

This chapter explains how and when to jump between the Music app and Windows Media Player. It also explains when you might want to jump ship and download a more full-featured app to meet your music needs.

Playing Music with the Music App

In keeping with the music of today’s youth, the Windows Music app recognizes music files only if they’re stored on either your PC, OneDrive, or, when told, a flash drive you’ve placed into your computer’s USB port. The Music app turns up its nose at playing those old-fashioned CDs or DVDs, so don’t even try.

But if you simply want to play or buy digital music, the Music app handles the job fairly simply and easily. When first opened, as shown in Figure 16-1, the program shows the music stored both on your own PC and — if you have a Microsoft Account — in your OneDrive account’s Music folder.

To launch the Music app and begin listening to music, follow these steps:

1. Click the Start menu’s Music tile.

   Fetch the Start menu with a click of the Start button in the screen’s lower-left corner. When the Start menu appears, click the Music app’s tile, shown in the margin.

   If you don’t spot the Music app’s tile, click the Start menu’s All Apps button and choose Music from the pop-up list of alphabetically sorted apps.

   The Music app fills the screen, as shown earlier in Figure 16-1, with automatically showing tiles representing your albums, artists, or songs. (When opened for the first time, you may need to click through some welcome screens.)

2. To play an album or song, click its tile and then click Play.

   Click a tile for an album or song, and the Music app shows your song (or album’s contents.) Click the Play button, and the app begins playing your choice.

3. Adjust the music while it plays.

   The App bar, shown along the bottom of Figure 16-1, offers you several icons to control your music: Shuffle, Repeat, Previous (to move to the previous song), Play/Pause, and Next (to move to the next song).

To adjust the volume, click the little speaker on the App bar in the screen’s bottom corner. Or, from the desktop, click the little speaker icon next to the clock on the taskbar, that strip along the desktop’s bottom edge.

Most touchscreen tablets include a volume toggle switch built in to one of their edges.

The Music app keeps playing music even if you begin working with other apps or switch to the desktop. To pause or move between tracks, you must return to the Music app.

Handing Music-Playing Chores Back to Windows Media Player

Microsoft hopes that the Music app and its easy-to-reach link to the Store app’s music marketplace will be a big moneymaker. Accordingly, Windows tries to shoehorn you into using the Music app. Open a music file from your desktop’s Music folder, for example, and the Start menu’s Music app butts in to play the file.

With its large controls, the Music app works fine on touchscreen tablets. However, when you switch to the desktop, you may prefer a more full-featured music program. Luckily, Windows 10 still includes Windows Media Player, a Windows desktop staple for a decade.

You can hand your computer’s music-playing chores back to the tried-and-true Windows Media player, but it’s not easy: Windows 10 hides the program’s name on the Start menu.

Follow the steps in this section to hand your music-playing chores back to Windows Media Player and to make the program easier to find.

1. Click the Start button, and when the Start menu appears, click the words All Apps in the menu’s bottom-left corner.

   The Start menu presents an alphabetical list of all your installed apps and programs.

2. Scroll down the Start menu’s list of apps and click the Windows Accessories entry. When the menu drops down, right-click the Windows Media Player tile (shown in the margin) and choose Pin to Start from the bottom menu.

   That places Windows Media Player’s icon as a tile on your Start menu for easy access. (You can choose Pin to Taskbar from the same menu to place a second link on your taskbar, the strip that runs along the bottom of the screen.)

   If you’re using a touchscreen, hold down your finger on the Start menu’s Windows Media Player entry for a moment and then lift your finger. When the pop-up menu appears, choose Pin to Taskbar.

3. Click the Back arrow (shown in the margin) below the All Apps list to return to the main Start menu. Then click the Start menu’s Settings link to fetch the Settings app.

4. When the Settings app appears, click the System icon and then click Default Apps.

   The right pane lists the apps and programs currently assigned to open your email, music, videos, and other items.

5. In the right pane’s Music Player section, click the Music app. When the pop-up menu appears, click Windows Media Player, as shown in Figure 16-2.

   This step tells Windows Media Player to play your music instead of the Start menu’s Music app.

After you follow these steps, Windows Media Player jumps into action whenever you double-click a music file on the desktop. You can also launch Windows Media Player directly by clicking its icon (shown in the margin) on your taskbar.

These steps don’t permanently disable or uninstall the Start menu’s Music app — it still works fine. To open the Music app, just click its tile from the Start menu. When the Music app appears, it still displays and plays all of your music.

However, when you click a song from the desktop’s File Explorer program, rather than the Music app leaping into action, Windows Media Player pops up and begins playing your song.

Stocking the Windows Media Player Library

You can load Windows Media Player by double-clicking its icon in the Start menu or taskbar, that strip along the desktop’s bottom edge. No icon in the Start menu or taskbar? The previous section explains how to put it here.

When you run Windows Media Player, the program automatically sorts through your computer’s stash of digital music, pictures, and videos, automatically cataloging everything it finds.

But if you’ve noticed that some of your PC’s media is missing from the Windows Media Player Library, you can tell the player where to find those items by following these steps:

Note: Unlike the Music app, Windows Media Player can play OneDrive files only if they are synced to your PC. It can’t play music files that are available on OneDrive only through the Internet.

1. Click Windows Media Player’s Organize button and choose Manage Libraries from the drop-down menu to reveal a pop-out menu.

   The pop-out menu lists the four types of media that Windows Media Player can handle: Music, Videos, Pictures, and Recorded TV.

2. From the pop-out menu, choose the name of the type of files you’re missing.

   A window appears, as shown in Figure 16-3, listing your monitored folders. For example, the player normally monitors the contents of your Music folder, so anything you add to your Music folder automatically appears in the Media Player Library, as well.

   But if you’re storing items elsewhere — perhaps on a portable hard drive, flash drive, network location, or your Public folder — here’s your chance to give the player directions to that other media stash.

3. Click the Add button, select the folder or drive containing your files, click the Include Folder button, and click OK.

   Clicking the Add button brings the Include Folder window to the screen. Navigate to the folder you’d like to add — the folder on your portable hard drive, for example — and click the Include Folder button. Windows Media Player immediately begins monitoring that folder, adding the folder’s music to its library.

   To add music from even more folders or drives — perhaps a folder on another networked PC or a flash drive — repeat these steps until you’ve added all the places Windows Media Player should search for media.

   To stop the player from monitoring a folder, follow these steps, but in Step 3, click the folder you no longer want monitored and then click the Remove button shown in Figure 16-3.

When you run Windows Media Player, the program shows the media it has collected (shown in Figure 16-4) and it continues to stock its library in the following ways:

• Monitoring your folders: Windows Media Player constantly monitors your Music, Pictures, and Videos folders, as well as any other locations you’ve added. Windows Media Player automatically updates its library whenever you add or remove files from your folders. (You can change what folders Windows Media Player monitors by following the three preceding steps.)
• Adding played items: Anytime you play a music file on your PC or from the Internet, Windows Media Player adds the song or its Internet location to its library so that you can find it to play again later. Unless specifically told to, Windows Media Player doesn’t add recently played items residing on other people’s PCs, USB flash drives, or memory cards. (It can’t play any music from OneDrive unless you’ve chosen to keep that music in sync with your PC, which I cover in Chapter 5.)
• Ripped music from CD: When you insert a music CD into your CD drive, Windows may offer to rip it. That’s computereze for copying the CD’s music to your PC, a task described in the “Ripping (Copying) CDs to Your PC” section, later in this chapter. Any ripped music automatically appears in your Windows Media Player Library. (Windows Media Player won’t copy DVD movies to your library, unfortunately, nor does it play the discs.)
• Downloaded music from online stores: When you buy a song and place it in your Music folder, Windows Media Player automatically stocks its library with your latest purchase.

Feel free to repeat the steps in this section to search for files whenever you want. Windows Media Player ignores the files it has already cataloged and adds any new ones.

Windows Media Player doesn’t offer an advanced editor for changing a song’s tags, which are described in the nearby sidebar. Instead, the player edits them for you automatically from an online database.

Browsing Windows Media Player’s Libraries

The Windows Media Player Library is where the behind-the-scenes action takes place. There, you organize files, create playlists, burn or copy CDs, and choose what to play.

When first loaded, Windows Media Player displays your Music folder’s contents, appropriately enough. But Windows Media Player actually holds several libraries, designed to showcase not only your music but also photographs, video, and recorded TV shows.

All your playable items appear in the Navigation Pane along the window’s left edge, shown in Figure 16-5. The pane’s top half shows your own media collection, appropriately listed with your name at the top.

The bottom half, called Other Libraries, lets you browse the collections of other people with accounts on your PC. You can also access the music shared by Homegroups — multiple PCs linked together through a special network. (I describe Homegroups in Chapter 15.)

Windows Media Player organizes your media into these categories:

• Playlists: Like playing albums or songs in a certain order? Click the Save List button atop your list of songs to save it as a playlist that shows up in this category. (I cover playlists in this chapter’s later “Creating, Saving, and Editing Playlists” section.)

• Music: All your digital music appears here. Windows Media Player recognizes most major music formats, including MP3, WMA, WAV, and even 3GP files used by some cellphones. (It recognizes non-copy-protected AAC files, sold by iTunes.) And Windows 10 finally adds support for the lossless FLAC, a format that compresses the music without losing any sound quality.)

• Videos: Look here for videos you’ve saved from a camcorder or digital camera or for videos you’ve downloaded from the Internet. Windows Media Player recognizes AVI, MPG, WMV, ASF, DivX, some MOV files, and a few other formats. Windows 10 also adds support for MKV files, a newly popular video format.

• Pictures: Windows Media Player can display photos individually or in a simple slide show, but your Pictures folder, described in Chapter 17, handles photos better. (Windows Media Player can’t correct upside-down photos, for example, a feat done easily from within your Pictures folder.)
• Other Libraries: Here you can find media appearing on other PCs in your Homegroup — a type of network I describe in Chapter 15.

After you click a category, Windows Media Player’s Navigation Pane lets you view the files in several different ways. Click Artist in the Navigation Pane’s Music category, for example, and the pane shows the music arranged alphabetically by artists’ first names.

Similarly, clicking Genre in the Music category separates songs and albums by different types of music, shown earlier in Figure 16-5. Instead of just showing a name to click — blues, for example — the player arranges your music into piles of covers, just as if you’d sorted your albums or CDs on your living room floor.

To play anything in Windows Media Player, right-click it and choose Play. Or to play all your music from one artist or genre, right-click the pile and choose Play All.

Playing Music Files in a Playlist

Windows Media Player plays several types of digital music files, but they all have one thing in common: When you tell Windows Media Player to play a song or an album, Windows Media Player immediately places that item on your Now Playing list — a list of items queued up for playing one after the other.

You can start playing music through Windows Media Player in a number of ways, even if Windows Media Player isn’t currently running:

• Click the File Explorer icon (shown in the margin) on your taskbar, right-click an album or a music-filled folder, and choose Play with Windows Media Player. The player jumps to the screen and begins playing your choice.
• While you’re still viewing your own Music folder, right-click items and choose Add to Windows Media Player List. Your computer queues them up in Windows Media Player, ready to be played after you’ve heard your currently playing music.
• Place a music CD in your computer’s CD drive tray and push the tray into your computer. When the pop-up message appears saying, “Play Audio CD,” click it to listen to the music.
• Double-click a song file, whether it’s sitting on your desktop or in any folder. Windows Media Player begins playing it immediately.

To play songs listed within Windows Media Player’s own library, right-click the song’s name and choose Play. Windows Media Player begins playing it immediately, and the song appears in the Now Playing list.

Here are other ways to play songs within Windows Media Player:

• To play an entire album in Windows Media Player’s library, right-click the album from the library’s Album category and choose Play.
• Want to hear several files or albums, one after the other? Right-click the first one and choose Play. Right-click the next one and choose Add to Now Playing list. Repeat until you’re done. Windows Media Player queues them all up in the Now Playing list.
• To return to a recently played item, right-click Windows Media Player’s icon in the taskbar. When the list of recently played items appears, click your item’s name.
• No decent music in your music folder? Then start copying your favorite CDs to your computer — a process called ripping, which I explain in the “Ripping (Copying) CDs to Your Computer” section, later in this chapter.

Controlling Your Now Playing Items

You can play music directly from the Windows Media Player Library: Just right-click a file, album, artist, or genre and then choose Play. Windows Media Player begins playing the music, but the program stays put, often filling the screen

To summon a smaller, more manageable player, click the Library/Player toggle button shown in the margin and summon the Now Playing window shown in Figure 16-6. (The Library/Player toggle button lives in the library’s bottom-right corner.)

The minimalist Now Playing window shows what’s currently playing, be it a video or artwork from your currently playing song. Onscreen controls let you adjust the volume, skip between listed songs or videos, or pause the action.

Windows Media Player offers the same basic controls when playing any type of file, be it a song, video, CD, or photo slide show. Figure 16-6 shows Windows Media Player open to its Now Playing window as it plays an album. The labels in the figure explain each button’s function. Or rest your mouse pointer over an especially mysterious button, and Windows Media Player displays a pop-up explanation.

The buttons along the bottom work like those found on any CD player, letting you play, stop, rewind, fast-forward, and mute the current song or movie. For even more controls, right-click anywhere in the Now Playing window. A menu appears, offering to perform these common tasks:

• Show List: Shows the playlist along the right side, which is handy for jumping directly to different songs.
• Full Screen: Enlarges the window to fill the screen.
• Shuffle: Plays songs randomly.
• Repeat: Loops the same song.
• Visualizations: Choose between showing the album cover, wavy lines, groovy spirals, dancing waves, or other freaky eye games.
• Enhancements: Opens an equalizer, balance adjuster, playback speed, volume balancer, and other sound options.
• Lyrics, Captions, or Subtitles: Display these items, if they’re available, which come in handy when practicing for Karaoke night.
• Shop for More Music: Instead of selling music, this option places the http://music.xbox.com website into Windows Media Player. There, it urges you to upload music to your OneDrive’s Music folder or to buy Microsoft’s streaming music service.
• Always Show Now Playing on Top: Keeps the window above your other windows on the desktop.
• More Options: Brings up the Options page, where you can tweak Windows Media Player’s habits when ripping CDs, stocking your Windows Media Player Library, and other tasks.
• Help with Playback: Fetches the Help program to deal with head-scratchers.

The Now Playing controls disappear from the screen when you haven’t moved the mouse for a while. To bring them back, move your mouse pointer over the Now Playing window.

To return to the Windows Media Player Library, click the Library/Player toggle icon in the window’s upper-right corner.

When you minimize Windows Media Player to the desktop’s taskbar, hover your mouse pointer over the player’s icon: A control pops up, letting you pause or jump between songs.

Playing CDs

As long as you insert the CD in the CD drive correctly (usually label-side up), playing a music CD is one of Windows Media Player’s easiest tasks. Start by pushing the drive’s Eject button, a rarely labelled button that lives next to or on the disc drive on the front of your computer.

When the drive tray emerges, drop the CD into your CD drive and push the tray back into the drive. Windows Media Player jumps to the screen to play it, usually identifying the CD and its musicians immediately. In many cases, it even tosses a picture of the cover art on the screen.

The controls along the bottom, shown earlier in Figure 16-6, let you jump from track to track, adjust the volume, and fine-tune your listening experience.

If for some odd reason Windows Media Player doesn’t start playing your CD, look at the Library item in Windows Media Player’s Navigation Pane along the left side of the window. You should spot either the CD’s name or the words Unknown Album. When you spot the listing, click it and then click the Play button to start listening.

Press F7 to mute Windows Media Player’s sound and pick up that phone call. Pressing Ctrl+P toggles the pause/play mode.

Want to copy that CD to your PC? That’s called ripping, and I cover ripping in the “Ripping (Copying) CDs to Your PC” section, later in this chapter.

Playing DVDs

And now for a bit of bad news: Windows Media Player can’t play DVDs. That news comes as a bit of a shock, considering the Windows 7 Media Player could play DVDs. What gives?

According to Microsoft, DVDs are old-school technology that’s no longer needed. Today’s ultrathin laptops and tablets don’t even have DVD drives. Most people watch movies by streaming them to their computers over the Internet, Microsoft says. Or, they watch their DVDs on TV.

Also, Microsoft no longer wanted to pay licensing fees to the companies owning the patents required for playing DVDs.

But although Windows Media Player can no longer play DVDs, Windows can still play DVDs with either of these solutions:

• Use the third-party DVD players provided by your computer manufacturer. Most desktop PC manufacturers toss in a free trial version of a DVD player. If you like it, you can pay to upgrade to the full version.
• Download the free VLC media player from www.videolan.org. Created by a nonprofit company based in France, it’s not under United States jurisdiction.

Playing Videos and TV Shows

Many digital cameras and smartphones can capture short videos as well as photos, so don’t be surprised if Windows Media Player places several videos in its library’s Video section.

Playing videos works much like playing a digital song. Click Videos in the Navigation Pane along Windows Media Player’s left side. Double-click the video you want to see and start enjoying the action, as shown in Figure 16-7.

Windows Media Player lets you watch videos in several sizes. Make it fill the screen by holding down Alt and press Enter, for example. (Repeat those keystrokes to return to the original size.)

• To make the video adjust itself automatically to the size of your Windows Media Player window, right-click the video as it plays, choose Video from the pop-up menu, and select Fit Video to Player on Resize.

• You can also toggle full-screen mode by clicking the Full Screen toggle in the video’s bottom-right corner, shown in Figure 16-7.
• When choosing video to watch on the Internet, your connection speed determines its quality. Broadband connections can usually handle high-definition videos, but slower connections and slower computers often have problems. You can’t damage your computer by choosing the wrong quality of video; the video just skips and pauses while playing.
• Windows Media Player’s Recorded TV area only lists TV shows recorded by Media Center, a program available on earlier Windows versions. If you upgraded your PC to Windows 10, your recorded TV shows remain. (Media Center, however, isn’t available for Windows 10, unfortunately.)

Creating, Saving, and Editing Playlists

A playlist is simply a list of songs (and/or videos) that play in a certain order. So what? Well, the beauty of a playlist comes with what you can do with it. Save a playlist of your favorite songs, for example, and they’re always available for playback with a single click.

You can create specially themed playlists to liven up long-distance drives, parties, special dinners, workouts, and other events.

To create a playlist, follow these steps:

1. Open Windows Media Player and find the playlist.

   Don’t see the playlist hugging Windows Media Player’s right edge? Click the Play tab near the top-right corner. Or when the player is in Now Playing mode, right-click a blank part of the Windows Media Player window and choose Show List from the pop-up menu: The list of currently playing items appears along Media Center’s right edge.

2. Right-click the album or songs you want, choose Add To, and select Play List.

   Alternatively, you can drag and drop albums and songs onto the Playlist pane along Windows Media Player’s right edge, as shown in Figure 16-8. Either way, Windows Media Player begins playing your playlist as soon as you add the first song. Your song choices appear in the right pane in the order you’ve selected them.

3. Fine-tune your playlist to change the order or remove songs.

   Added something by mistake? Right-click that item from the playlist and choose Remove from List. Feel free to rearrange your playlist by dragging and dropping items farther up or down the list.

   Check the line at the bottom of the playlist to see how many items you’ve added to the playlist as well as your playlist’s duration in minutes.

4. When you’re happy with your playlist, click the Save List button at the list’s top, type a name in the highlighted box, and press Enter.

   Windows Media Player lists your new playlist in the library’s Playlists section, ready to be heard when you double-click it.

After you save a playlist, you can burn it to a CD with one click, as described in the next tip.

Make your own Desert Island Disc or Greatest Hits playlists and then burn them to a CD to play in your car or on your home stereo. After you create a playlist of less than 80 minutes, insert a blank CD into your CD burner and click the Burn tab. Take up the player’s offer to import your current playlist and then click the Start Burn button.

To edit a previously created playlist, double-click the playlist’s name in the Library’s Playlists area. Rearrange, add, or delete items in the playlist and then click the Save List button.

Ripping (Copying) CDs to Your PC

In a process known as ripping, Windows Media Player can copy your CDs to your PC as MP3 files, the industry standard for digital music. But until you tell the player that you want MP3 files, it creates WMA files — a format that won’t play on iPads, most smartphones, nor many other music players.

To make Windows Media Player create songs with the more versatile MP3 format instead of WMA, click the Organize button in the top-left corner, choose Options, and click the Rip Music tab. Choose MP3 instead of WMA from the Format drop-down menu and nudge the audio quality over a tad from 128 to 256 or even 320 for better sound.

To copy CDs to your PC’s hard drive, follow these instructions:

1. Open Windows Media Player, insert a music CD, and click the Rip CD button.

   You may need to push a button on the front or side of your computer’s disc drive to make the tray eject.

   Windows Media Player connects to the Internet; identifies your CD; and fills in the album’s name, artist, and song titles. Then the program begins copying the CD’s songs to your PC and listing their titles in the Windows Media Player Library. You’re through.

   If Windows Media Player can’t find the songs’ titles automatically, however, move ahead to Step 2.

2. Right-click the first track and choose Find Album Info, if necessary.

   If Windows Media Player comes up empty-handed, right-click the first track and choose Find Album Info.

   If you’re connected to the Internet, type the album’s name into the Search box and then click Search. If the Search box finds your album, click its name, choose Next, and click Finish.

   If you’re not connected to the Internet, or if the Search box comes up empty, right-click the first song, click Edit, and manually fill in the song title. Repeat for the other titles, as well as the album, artist, genre, and year tags.

Here are some tips for ripping CDs to your computer:

• Normally Windows Media Player copies every song on the CD. To leave Tiny Tim off your ukulele music compilation, however, remove the check mark from Tiny Tim’s name. If Windows Media Player has already copied the song to your PC, feel free to delete it from within Windows Media Player. Click the Library button, right-click the song sung by the offending yodeler, and choose Delete.
• Windows Media Player automatically places your ripped CDs into your Music folder. You can also find your newly ripped music there as well as in the Windows Media Player Library.

Burning (Creating) Music CDs

To create a music CD with your favorite songs, create a playlist containing the CD’s songs, listed in the order you want to play them; then burn the playlist to a CD. I explain how to do that in the “Creating, Saving, and Editing Playlists” section, earlier in this chapter.

But what if you want to duplicate a CD, perhaps to create a disposable copy of your favorite CD to play in your car? No sense scratching up your original. You’ll want to make copies of your kids’ CDs, too, before they create pizzas out of them.

Unfortunately, neither Windows Media Player nor Windows 10 offer a Duplicate CD option. Instead, you must jump through the following five hoops to create a new CD with the same songs in the same fidelity as the original CD:

1. Rip (copy) the music to your hard drive.

   Before ripping your CD, change your burning quality to the highest quality: Click Organize, choose Options, click the Rip Music tab, and change the Format box to WAV (Lossless). Click OK.

2. Insert a blank CD into your writable CD drive.
3. In Windows Media Player’s Navigation Pane, click the Music category and choose Album to see your saved CDs.

4. Right-click the newly ripped album in your library, choose Add To, and choose Burn List.

   If your Burn List already had some listed music, click the Clear List button to clear it; then add your CD’s music to the Burn List.

5. Click the Start Burn button.

Now, for the fine print. Unless you change the quality to WAV (Lossless) when copying the CD to your PC, Windows Media Player compresses your songs as it saves them on your hard drive, throwing out some audio quality in the process. Burning them back to CD won’t replace that lost quality. If you want the most accurate duplicates Windows Media Player can handle, change the Ripping Format to WAV (Lossless).

If you do change the format to WAV (Lossless) in order to duplicate a CD, remember to change it back to MP3 afterward, or else your hard drive will run out of room when you begin ripping a lot of CDs.

A simpler solution might be to buy CD-burning software from your local office supply or computer store. Unlike Windows Media Player, most CD-burning programs have a Duplicate CD button for one-click convenience.