Windows Media Player 11 is loaded with smart, fun features that breathe new life into your music collection and create a much more personal entertainment experience. The new design lets you get the most out of your digital library and enjoy simple solutions for managing it all.

Media Guide

The Media Guide offers free music videos, movie trailers, and quick access to online radio stations.

Great options for ripping CDs

You can use Windows Media Player 11 to rip songs from your CDs to your computer so that they become files on your computer. After that, you can sync the ripped songs with a portable music player, a Windows Mobile Smartphone or Pocket PC, or other compatible portable media device; burn a customized music CD for enjoying at a party or in your car; or play the songs anytime from your computer without the hassle of having to find the original CD.

Designed for music lovers

As you build a larger and larger digital music collection by ripping CDs, downloading songs from the Web, and buying music from online stores, it's more important than ever to be able to quickly organize and explore all of that music. Windows Media Player 11 is optimized to handle massive libraries of digital music-literally millions of tracks-so you can scroll, flip, and browse your way through your entire collection at high speed without skipping a beat. 

Simplified library

The navigation for the library remains in the left pane, but a number of improvements have been made to help with organization, layout, and flow. Music now has its own focused view, with a simple list showing artists, albums, songs, genres, years, and ratings. You can add additional items to this list by right-clicking Library in the navigation pane and selecting Show more views.

Album art views

Enjoying digital music shouldn't mean giving up your album art. Delivering a more visual experience, Windows Media Player 11 uses album art throughout the library, renewing a physical connection with music and providing you with a much easier reference when browsing through Artist, Album, and Song views.

Stacking

Albums that share the same characteristics (Artist, Genre, Year, and so forth) are shown in "stacks," providing you with a visual reference that mimics a "stack" of CDs or records.

Adding missing album art

With the increased emphasis on album art, Windows Media Player 11 also ensures that missing album art isn't a problem. Most album art can automatically be populated in the background using the advanced audio fingerprinting capabilities in Windows Media Player 11.

You can also have the Player search the Web for missing album art and information (metadata) and add it to your music files (tag them) with the result. If, for some reason, album art isn't available and you have the artwork as a digital image or want to add customized album art, you can simply right-click on the blank album icon and select Paste Album Art to use a copied image.

Library layout options

Library views are customizable with Icon, Tile, and Detail options. Pane views, columns, and album art can also be resized to achieve your desired library layout and overall Player experience.

Instant Search

Large libraries with fast performance are great, but what happens when you only remember part of a song title or you want to immediately jump right to the music you are looking for? Instant Search allows fast access to your digital music collection. Just type in the track, album, artist, or a keyword-or even part of a name-and let Instant Search do the work for you. Results are returned with each keystroke, narrowing down the choices as you type, and providing lightning-fast response time, regardless of the size of your library.

Advanced audio fingerprinting

With large digital music libraries, tracks usually come from a number of different places, with varying levels of accurate media information (metadata). It's often hard to ensure all of your tracks are tagged appropriately. In addition to automated metadata tools that run in the background, Windows Media Player 11 now includes audio waveform matching that builds on existing media information features and precisely pinpoints the exact album information for your tracks.

How does this work? As you start ripping CDs into Windows Media Player 11, information is compiled through a database and waveforms are matched to identify the song. Information is verified and then attached to the song or album.

Playlists made easy

You can still create playlists by dragging songs or albums into the List pane, but Windows Media Player 11 includes two new options for creating and saving playlists. The Create Playlist link in the navigation pane provides one-click access to creating playlists. Simple save and naming capabilities in the List pane provide intuitive playlist creation right at your fingertips.

New playlists can also be created on the fly using the Shuffle Playlist feature. This feature makes it a one-click process to create a new playlist out of your favorite tracks. With a simple click of the Shuffle Playlist link, Windows Media Player generates a list of tracks weighted by highest ratings. With each click of the link, a fresh and completely new list of tracks is generated.

Source: Microsoft.com