Windows Media Player 11 tips: library, ripping, playlists and sharing

Windows Media Player 11 was a big step up from the players that came before it. It shipped as the built-in music and video player in Windows Vista, and Microsoft also released it as a separate download for Windows XP. The headline change was a completely redesigned library: a cleaner interface, much faster search, rich album-art views that let you browse a collection visually rather than as endless file lists, and a new media-sharing feature for streaming your library to other devices around the house.

The original post that lived at this address was short and to the point — a handful of neat playback shortcuts. Those still work, and we have preserved them below. Around them we have built out a fuller, practical guide to the things people actually spend time on in Media Player 11: getting the library tidy, fixing wrong or missing album art, searching and browsing efficiently, ripping CDs at the quality you want, building playlists that maintain themselves, and sharing everything to the rest of your network.

The original tips: playback speed shortcuts

These are the tricks from the post this page restores. They change how fast the current track or video plays without changing its pitch dramatically, which is handy for stepping through a spoken-word recording, a lecture or a tutorial:

• To slow down playback, press CTRL+SHIFT+S.
• To speed up playback, press CTRL+SHIFT+G.
• To return to normal playback speed, press CTRL+SHIFT+N.
• To see a menu with all of the above on it, right-click the Play/Pause button in the bottom centre of the Windows Media Player window.

The original author noted these were tested on a pre-release (Release Candidate) build of Windows Vista. They carried through to the final release and behave the same way in the Now Playing view.

Get the library right first

Almost everything good about Media Player 11 flows from a well-organised library. The player groups and displays your music using the information stored inside each file — the metadata, also called tags: artist, album, track number, genre, year and so on. When those tags are clean, the album, artist and genre views look great and search finds things instantly. When they are messy, you get duplicate albums, "Unknown Artist" piles and tracks that refuse to group together.

Add your music folders to the library

Media Player 11 builds its library by monitoring folders you nominate. If a song is not showing up, the folder it lives in probably is not being watched. Click the arrow below the Library tab and choose Add to Library; the dialog that opens lets you manage the monitored folders. Point it at the folders where you keep your music and video, and let it scan. From then on, files you drop into those folders appear in the library automatically.

Fix metadata so albums group correctly

The single most common library complaint is one album showing up as several. That happens when tracks from the same CD carry slightly different tags — a stray space, a different spelling of the artist, or one track tagged with a guest artist while the rest are not. To fix it, switch to the album or artist view, select the tracks that belong together, and edit the fields so they match exactly. You can usually right-click a track or a selection and choose to edit the details, or click directly into a field in the details list to type a correction.

A few habits keep a library clean:

• Make the Album Artist consistent across every track on a release — this is the field the player groups albums by, and it is what keeps compilations together instead of splitting them by each featured performer.
• Give every track its correct track number so the album plays in order.
• Keep genre names consistent (decide on "Hip-Hop" or "Hip Hop" and stick to it) so the genre view stays tidy.
• Let the player look up missing details online where you are comfortable doing so; correct anything it gets wrong by hand afterwards.

Fix or add album art

Media Player 11's visual views live and die by cover art. When art is missing or plainly wrong, you have two reliable options. First, let the player try to find it: there is usually an option to find or update album info that fetches artwork and details from the online database. Second, add art yourself — copy an image to the clipboard (for example a square cover you have saved), then right-click the album and choose Paste Album Art. Pasting is the surest fix when the online lookup returns the wrong cover or nothing at all.

If art keeps disappearing, it is often because the image was only stored in the player's own cache and not embedded in the files or saved into the album folder. Adding a square image named as a folder cover inside the album's own folder is the most durable approach, because the art then travels with the music.

Search and browse like the library was designed for

Media Player 11 made search genuinely fast, and it is the quickest way to reach anything in a large collection.

The search box

The search box sits at the top of the library. Start typing and results narrow as you go, matching across artist, album, title and other fields at once — so typing part of a song title, an album name or a performer all work. Clear the box to return to the full view. It searches within whichever category you are currently browsing, which is worth remembering if a result seems to be "missing": widen to the whole music library and search again.

Artist, album and genre views

Down the left side, the library is organised into views. The three you will use most for music are:

• Artist — every performer, each opening to their albums. Best when you know who you want to hear.
• Album — a wall of covers. This is the view that rewards good album art, and it is a pleasant way to rediscover things you had forgotten you owned.
• Genre — your whole collection grouped by style, which is ideal for putting on a broad mood without picking individual records.

These views only look as good as your tags, which is exactly why the metadata cleanup above pays off every time you open the player.

Ripping CDs: choose format and quality deliberately

If you still have CDs, Media Player 11 rips them into your library, and the two settings that matter most are the format and the audio quality. Set both before you rip, because they apply to new rips rather than to tracks already in the library.

You will find the rip options under the Rip tab's menu. In broad terms:

• Format. Media Player 11 can rip to Windows Media Audio (WMA) and its variants, Windows Media Audio Lossless, and MP3. WMA and MP3 are compressed formats that trade a little audio detail for much smaller files. Lossless keeps the full CD quality but produces substantially larger files. MP3 is the safest choice if you want the widest compatibility with other devices and players.
• Audio quality. A slider sets the bitrate for the compressed formats. A higher bitrate sounds closer to the original and takes more disk space; a lower bitrate saves space at the cost of fidelity. If you are unsure, a middling-to-high bitrate is a sensible default for general listening.

Playlists and auto-playlists

A playlist is just a saved running order you assemble by hand — drag tracks into the list pane on the right, arrange them, and save. Great for a specific occasion or a mixtape.

The more powerful feature is the auto-playlist: a playlist defined by rules rather than by a fixed list of songs. You set criteria and the player fills and updates the list for you as your library changes. Because the rules are evaluated live, an auto-playlist is always current. Useful recipes include:

• Everything you have added recently — a rolling "new to me" list.
• Tracks of a chosen genre and above a certain rating, for a reliable-favourites mix.
• Songs you have rarely or never played, to surface neglected corners of a big collection.
• A specific artist or era capped to a set number of tracks or minutes.

Click the arrow below the Library tab and choose Create Auto Playlist, then add and combine criteria. Rating tracks as you listen (many people use the star ratings) makes these rules far more useful over time.

Share your library across the home network

One of Media Player 11's signature additions was media sharing — streaming your library to other compatible players and devices on the same home network, so the music living on one PC can play on another PC, or on a networked media receiver, without copying files around.

The essentials:

1. Turn on media sharing by clicking the arrow below the Library tab and choosing Media Sharing on the PC that holds the library.
2. When another device on the network asks to connect, it appears in the sharing list; allow the devices you trust and ignore the rest.
3. Make sure both machines are on the same private home network. Sharing is designed for trusted home networks, not public ones, and a network set as "Public" will usually block it.

Once sharing is on, the shared library shows up on the receiving device under a heading for other libraries on the network, and you browse and play it much like your own — subject to the same tag quality, which is one more reason the cleanup at the top of this guide is worth doing once and doing properly.

Where Windows Media Player 11 stands today

It is worth being honest about the era. Windows Media Player 11 was excellent for its time, but that time has passed. It was the last numbered version to run on Windows XP; Windows 7 shipped with Media Player 12; and current Windows 10 and Windows 11 include a newer, separate Media Player app alongside the legacy Windows Media Player still present for compatibility. If you are reading this on a modern PC, the concepts here — clean tags, good album art, smart use of search and views, deliberate rip settings, rules-based playlists — all carry straight over to the current app, even though the buttons have moved. If you are keeping an older Vista or XP machine alive, the tips above are exactly as relevant as the day the library redesign first landed.