You can apply effects to your playlists that will enhance your listening experience.
There are a couple of really simple tricks for polishing your playlists, and both are available in Windows Media Player: crossfading and volume leveling. Crossfading simply fades songs into one another, like radio DJs do. The first song fades out as the second one fades in. This is a neat trick when creating CDs or playlists for dances or weddings.
Volume leveling makes sure the songs in your playlists are of equal volume. If you’ve copied and/or downloaded music from different sources, you’ll likely understand the importance of volume leveling. Music recorded from analog sources, Internet radio stations, CDs, and web sites can have varying degrees of loudness. When you create and play a playlist or burn a CD with those songs, one song may be too quiet to hear while another may blow you out of your chair!
Incorporating either or both of these technologies can make for interesting CDs and musical experiences. Here’s how to enable crossfading:
1. Open Windows Media Player 10 from Start | All Programs |
Accessories | Entertainment | Windows Media Player.
2. Right-click the Library tab, point to View | Enhancements, and click
Crossfading And Auto Volume Leveling.
3. Click Turn On Crossfading (the option
changes to Turn Off Crossfading).
4. Move the slider to define how long you want the overlap to last.
5. Click the X in the top-right corner of the Crossfading And Auto
Volume Leveling pane to close it.
To enable volume leveling requires a few extra steps. First, the music you want to level out must be stored on your hard drive. As you’d expect, you can’t make changes to the volume of songs on a read-only CD from a music store or one that you’ve burned.
Second, you have to tell Windows Media Player you want to use volume leveling, and let the application assign volume leveling values to your music. Your newest music, the music you added to the Media Library using Windows Media Player, will already have values: they’re automatically assigned. But if you have music that is older, or music you acquired while using a different version of the Media Player or a third-party player, you have to tell Windows Media Player 10 to assign values to those files. Since it’s difficult to remember where all of your music files came from, this step is recommended at initial setup.
Finally, turn on volume leveling, letting the Media Player know that’s what you prefer. From here on out, you’ll have volume leveling applied to all of your music.
To add volume leveling and configure your computer to apply it to all music files:
1. Open Windows Media Player 10 from Start | All Programs |
Accessories | Entertainment | Windows Media Player.
2. Right-click Library, point to File | Add To Library, and click By
Searching Computer.
3. In the Search On list, select All Drives.
4. Click Browse and, in the Browse For Folder dialog box, locate
the area of your hard drive where your music files are located.
Click OK.
5. To get the most extensive search and information, click the New
Files And All Existing Files In Library (Slow) radio button. Verify
that Add Volume Leveling Values For All Files (Slow) is also
checked. Click Search.
6. Click OK when the Media Player has finished searching for files.
7. Right-click Library, point to View | Enhancements, and click
Crossfading And Auto Volume Leveling.
8. In the Enhancements pane, select Turn On Auto Volume Leveling.
(If volume leveling is already on, the option says Turn Off Auto
Volume Leveling; if that’s the case, don’t do anything.)