5 Great WMP Tips and Tricks

1. Go from full screen to compact with a click

Windows Media Player 11 offers three choices of looks – the default Full mode, the Compactmode and the Skin mode (with choice of skins). While listening to music, you can just click on a tiny arrow and switch to compact mode. Press Enter to revert back to the Full mode. The Skinmode can be applied from Menu – View – Skin Mode. The better option is to become quick fingered with the keyboard –

For Full Mode – CTRL + 1

For Skin Mode – CTRL + 2

2. Keyboard toggles for volume control

Three quick and easy to remember keyboard taps to control volume instead of reaching for the mouse.

Increase volume: F9
Decrease volume: F8
Mute sound: F7

3. Resolve codecs and play it all

With the hundreds of codecs in use today, Windows Media Player isn’t bundled with them all. Fortunately, freely available codec packs fill up this lacuna and let us play everything from Real Media to DivX.

To find out the codecs installed, go to Help – About Windows Media Player – click on Technical Support Information. A browser page opens up with all audio and video codecs listed.

You can play almost everything with the K-Lite codec pack. Other must have downloads include the XP Codec Pack and Vista Codec Pack. Even watching hi-definition DivX movies is not a problem with the freely downloadable codecs. If there’s still something not right then check out these previous posts:

4. Search – get two birds with one search

You can search your library for audio tracks using a combination of search terms. The + or ANDoperator lets you search a song using two values. For instance, search by song and singer – Pink Floyd AND The Final Cut.

Use the OR operator to search across two attributes – Jazz OR Blues. Songs can be searched according to length, ratings, whether it is protected or not etc. The results depend on the media information that’s available with the song.

Look at the help file (Help – Organizing your digital media collection – How do I perform advanced searches?) for more search operators.

5. Play songs according to musical eras

Do you like the golden oldies or the more current hip-hop? WMP 11 lets you play songs according to the period mentioned in the tracks. Type in the year range, like 1980..1990 for all songs in that period. This gives you a short cut to particular songs without trawling throughout the library or creating period playlists.