5 more WMP Tricks

1. Go Bass with the SRS WOW effects

SRS WOW Effects let you increase the bass (i.e. the lowest part of a musical range) of a track for richer quality sounds. The SRS WOW Effects can be found under Menu – View – Enhancements. Turn on the effects and choose your speaker type. Slider movement sets the TruBass between high and low. The adjacent slider increases or decreases the WOW effect.

2. Smooth the flow of streamed music

Streaming content relies on buffers to smoothly playback a movie or music track. To compensate for the stop gap of internet bandwidth due to slow speeds or packet drops, WMP stores a few seconds of content before it starts the playback. As the streaming proceeds, some content continuously gets stored in the background (that’s the buffer).

The buffer size can be changed if you feel that the streaming is not smooth enough. From theMenu (or right click on title bar), choose Options – Performance tab. In the Network bufferingsection choose the bullet option for Buffer and enter any value between 0 to 60 to buffer that much of content before playback. Click OK. Too much buffering can slow downloads.

3. Tweak speed for podcasts and speech audio

Don’t let your interest flag with the slow drone of an audio book or podcast. Some simple settings allow you to change the pace of the voice. With the audio playing, from the Menuchoose – View – Enhancements. Alternatively, right click on the WMP title and select. The Play Speed Settings shows a slider which can be dragged to the left for slow playback and to the right for faster play speeds. Or you can choose from the three presets – Slow, Normal or Fast. You have to trust your ears as not all files will sound well with change in playback speeds.

4. Shed light on dark movies

Enhancements include another setting which helps me out with making light corrections to particularly dark movie scenes. From the Enhancements sub-menu choose Video Settings. Lighten up the scene by slightly increasing the Brightness (drag the slider to the right).

5. Censor Movies by Ratings

In my wonder years, it was ‘Blue Lagoon’. Now, I am not sure what’s PG and what’s not! But you can prevent DVD movies with ‘not suitable for children’ ratings from being played through the WMP. Windows Media Player 11 allows you to block certain movies which have higher playback restrictions using a simple dropdown. Navigate to Tools – Options – DVD tab. Select the restriction from the dropdown. (Umm…but I guess your child will be smart enough to sidetrack this lockdown).