Playing Digital Music with Windows Media Player

After you've downloaded a fair number of digital audio files, it's time to start listening to them which you do with a music player program. As you learned in Chapter 31, "Playing CDs and DVDs," the most popular music player program is Windows Media Player (WMP), which is provided free with Microsoft Windows, and is probably already installed on your PC.

Playing Digital Audio Files

To play a digital audio file with Windows Media Player, you follow these steps:

1. Select the Now Playing tab.
   
   

2. Select File, Open.
   
   

3. When the Open dialog box appears, select the file you want to play; the file you selected will start playing automatically.
   
   

WMP stores your favorite files in what it calls the Media Library (shown in Figure 33.4). To add a file to the Media Library, select File, Add to Media Library; then select either Add Currently Playing Track (to add the song you're listening to) or Add File or Playlist (to add another file stored on your hard disk).

Figure 33.4. Store your favorite MP3 files in WMP's Media Library.

Creating a Playlist of Your Favorite Songs

Files in your WMP Media Library can be combined into playlists. You can create playlists from the files you have stored on your hard disk, in any order you want just like listening to a radio station's playlist.

To create a new playlist, follow these steps:

1. Select the Media Library tab.
   
   

2. Click the Playlists button and select New Playlist.
   
   

3. When the New Playlist dialog box appears, shown in Figure 33.5, enter a name for the playlist.
   
   

   Figure 33.5. Add songs to your new playlist.

   

   
   

4. The left side of the New Playlist dialog box displays all the songs in your Media Library. (Pull down the View Media Library list to display songs by artist, album, genre, and so on.) Click a song to add it to your playlist.
   
   

5. Click OK when done.
   
   

tip

To play the songs in a playlist in random order, click the Turn Shuffle On button or select Play, Shuffle.

Playing an entire playlist is as simple as going to the Media Library and double-clicking a playlist in the left-hand pane. WMP will start playing the first song in your playlist, and go on from there.