MORE INFORMATION
Using the navigation buttons
Windows Media Player has several other buttons you can use to enhance your playing experience. The following buttons are always at the bottom of the window in the full mode Player and are listed here from left to right:
- Play/Pause
- Stop
- Seek
- Mute
- Volume
- Previous
- Fast Reverse
- Fast Forward
- Next
- Switch to compact mode
If you hover over a button with the mouse pointer, the name of the button will appear.
Figure 2.6 shows the navigation buttons for the full mode Player. These buttons are also called transport buttons and use symbols that are common to the electronic industry for controlling tape recorders, VCRs, and CD players. You'll often see the same button symbols in skins, but because every artist designs skins his own way, and the artwork varies widely, you won't necessarily find all the same buttons in each skin, or the buttons may not be in the same order.
Figure 2.6: Navigation buttons.
Here is a brief explanation of each button.
Play/Pause
This button toggles back and forth between two states: Play and Pause. Play starts the selected music or video playing, and Pause pauses it. Clicking
Play from a paused state will start the program playing from the same position it was paused at.
Stop
This button stops a currently playing program. If you click
Play after clicking
Stop, the program will start over at the beginning.
Seek
This is the long bar that extends above the other buttons. The
Seek bar shows the current position in the file. If you click and drag the tiny box, you can change the current position in the file to anywhere you want. The left end of the
Seek bar represents the beginning of the file, and the right end represents the end of the file. So the midpoint of the bar represents the midpoint of the file, regardless of
its length.
Mute
Click this to mute the sound of the currently playing file. Click it again to return the sound to its previous volume.
Volume
This is a short triangular bar with a box above it. Click and drag the box left or right to increase or decrease the volume of the sound.
Previous
Click this to go to the previous title in a playlist.
Fast Reverse
Click this to move the current seek position of the file backward. Click it again to start playing from the new seek position. This button only works for video files that use the Windows Media video file format.
Fast Forward
Click this to move the current seek position of the file forward. Click it again to start playing from the new seek position. This button only works for video files that use the Windows Media video file format.
Next
Click this to go to the next title in the playlist.
Switch to compact mode
Use this to change the Player display to compact mode. This will change the user interface to the default skin or the last skin you selected.
Watching visualizations
At the bottom of the left side of the
Now Playing pane, you'll see two buttons. Click these to change visualization presets. These buttons are shown in Figure 2.7.
Figure 2.7: Previous visualization and Next visualization preset buttons.
Visualizations draw moving shapes and colors on the screen that rise and fall in time to the beat and tone of the music. Several visualizations are included with Windows Media Player, and more are available from the Windows Media Player Visualizations Gallery. Click
Download Visualizations on the
Tools menu to go there.
Each visualization has several presets. Each preset gives a different "flavor" or "twist" to the visualization; for example, one preset might make all the colors soft pastels and another preset would make them vivid primary colors. You can change visualizations and presets by clicking the
Previous visualization and
Next visualization buttons. The visualization and preset names are displayed to the right of the buttons, with the visualization name first, and the preset name following, separated by a colon.
You won't see a visualization if you're playing a video,
because they both use the same display pane.
Changing other settings
There's one other button that can be useful when playing audio and video. At the top of the full mode Windows Media Player, just to the right of center, you'll see the
Show Equalizer & Settings button that looks like Figure 2.8.
Figure 2.8: Show/Hide Equalizer & Settings in Now Playing button.
Clicking this button will show a new pane in the Now Playing area that is below the visualization/video pane. This pane covers several settings. To move to a new setting, click the
Previous setting or
Next setting button. These buttons are shown in Figure 2.9.
Figure 2.9: Previous setting and Next setting buttons.
The following settings are accessed from this pane by clicking the
Previous setting and
Next setting buttons:
- SRS WOW Effects
- Graphic Equalizer
- Video Settings
- Windows Media Information
- Captions
Here is a brief explanation of each setting.
SRS WOW Effects settings
This pane allows you to adjust the SRS WOW settings. SRS is a type of surround sound that makes your audio sound more lifelike and three-dimensional. You can see the
SRS WOW Effects pane in Figure 2.10.
Figure 2.10: SRS WOW Effects pane.
On the right is the logo for SRS. Click it to find out more about SRS. On the left are two horizontal sliders that adjust the
TruBass and
WOW Effect. Between the two sliders and the SRS logo are two buttons: the top turns SRS on and off, and the bottom one toggles between various presets.
Here is a brief explanation of each button:
TruBass
Sliding this all the way to the right increases the bass enhancement of the audio. Sliding to the left decreases it.
WOW Effect
Sliding this to the right increases the perceived height and width of the audio image.
On/Off
Click this toggle button to turn the
SRS WOW Effects on or off.
Speaker Settings
Click this to toggle through the following speaker settings:
normal speakers,
large speakers, and
headphones.
Graphic Equalizer settings
This pane allows you to adjust the audio to make it sound exactly the way you'd like. If you want to boost the bass or cut out high notes, this is the place to do it. Figure 2.11 shows the
Graphic Equalizer pane.
Figure 2.11: Graphic Equalizer pane.
On the left you see ten sliders that correspond to ten divisions of the audio spectrum. Move the leftmost slider up to increase the power of the lowest frequencies, move it down to reduce them. Similarly, the rightmost slider controls the upper tenth of the spectrum (the highest frequencies). Play with the sliders to see what sounds good to you.
To the immediate right of the sliders are two buttons. The top one turns the graphic equalizer on or off. If it is off, the settings are completely "flat," that is, no modification is made to the sounds. The bottom button toggles through several presets that are based on popular styles of music. For example, the
Jazz preset will boost the middle frequencies more than the
Acoustic setting. If you make changes in the
Custom preset, those changes will be saved for the next time you use the Player.
To the right of those two buttons is a final horizontal slider that allows you to adjust the stereo balance. Move it to the left to increase the apparent volume of the left channel and to the right to increase the right volume.
Video settings
This pane allows you to adjust the video to make it look the way you like it. If you want to adjust the brightness or the intensity of the color, this is the place to do it. Figure 2.12 shows the
Video Settings pane.
Figure 2.12: Video Settings pane.
On the left side of the pane are four horizontal sliders. They adjust the
Brightness,
Contrast,
Hue, and
Saturation of the video picture. To the right of these sliders is a button that resets all the sliders to their default (centered) positions.
Here is a brief explanation of each slider:
Brightness
This adjusts the brightness of the video picture. Slide it all the way to the left to make the picture completely black and all the way to the right to make it completely white. Usually you'll want it somewhere in between.
Contrast
Use this to sharpen or blur video images. Moving this slider all the way to the left makes the picture sharper. This effect is sometimes known as posterization. Moving it to the right makes the image look blurry, as if everything was photographed in a dense fog or underwater.
Hue
Adjust the hue for basic color changes. Slide it to the left to make everything more red/purple and to the right for green.
Saturation
This adjusts how much color is shown in the video. Slide the slider all the way to the left, and only the gray tones are used, with no color at all. Slide it all the way to the right, and the colors are extremely intense (saturated).
Windows Media Information
This pane isn't really a setting, but shows additional information about a particular item. For example, if you load the Sample Playlist, and open the
Windows Media Information pane, you'll see something like Figure 2.13.
Figure 2.13: Windows Media Information pane.
The
Windows Media Information pane can display details such as genre and label, but can also display pictures, links, and other useful information. In this example, if you click the album cover or the link to the right of it, you'll be taken to a Web page that gives more details about the artist, album, label, and so on.
Captions
This pane isn't really a setting either, but shows captions for video files. See Figure 2.14 for a typical caption file.
Figure 2.14: Captions pane.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
