Listen to Digital Tunes

Lenny Bailes

Warning: Microsoft issues stern warnings predicting doom and gloom if you install the prerelease version of Windows Media Player 7 software. We didn't experience any problems in our testing, but if you have valuable data on your hard drive, you should back it up as a precaution before you install Windows Media Player.

Microsoft's Windows Media Player 7 makes it easier than ever to find and play a specific song in your music library. The built-in search feature in Windows Media Player is faster and more convenient than using the Find Files command built into Windows, since it searches only among the multimedia files in your library and displays the results in a convenient Windows Media Player playback window.

Now that you can find all the tracks you want, you can follow the steps below to build a playlist out of your favorite tunes:

1. Select Media Library from the list of tabs on the left side of the program window.
2. Click the Search button (located between "Add to playlist" and "Media details" in the Library track display).
3. Enter the keyword or words you want to search for in your library. The search engine will match words in the Name, Artist, and Album fields in the Media Library: If you were to search for "dark," for example, it would return all tracks and artists' names with that word in it, as well as the complete listing of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album (if you had it on your hard drive) because all the tracks have the word "dark" in the album name. You can also specify that the search return matches for any word in any field, all your search terms together, or the exact phrase you're searching for.
4. Click the Search Now button and click View Results when the search is complete. The results will be displayed in the right pane of the Media Library, and a Search Results playlist will appear in the left pane of the My Playlists section. To play all of the selections, double-click the Search Results entry. This entry will persist in Windows Media Player until you either rename it to something more memorable (right-click Search Results and pick the Rename item), or delete it (right-click Search Results and choose the Delete command).