Ever cleaned out the music library, removed some albums or updated album art only to find that Windows 7 Media Center is still using the old album art in various places throughout the program? It’s a common problem due to the fact that Media Center utilizes an album art cache that is rarely (if ever) checked for consistency. This [...]
Among the improvements included in Windows 7’s Media Center are a new album art waterfall display for Now Playing music and a brand new Photo slide show screensaver. Both are enabled by default but what if you’d like to turn them off or have done so by accident? Maybe you’d like to change the settings a bit. Let’s take [...]
If you’ve participated in the Windows 7 program for some time now you may have noticed in more recent versions that the animated waterfall album art background that is displayed while playing music has slowed down considerably. Almost to a “glacial rate” as one user put it. This was done to accommodate lower performance PCs that were having trouble [...]
At one point or another many of us have put a substantial amount of time into organizing our digital music collections. We’re likely to have organized the file structure by genre, artist, album, etc. While the native music library provides a single level of sorting, allowing you to choose to sort by artist or genre, it doesn’t provide a [...]
From time to time it’s nice to have a go to playlist ready of preselected music for a certain occasion. Most of us would agree that using Media Center to build those playlists is far from ideal though. Many of us have multiple family members who’d like to create playlists from their personal PCs and be able to access [...]
You probably want the best quality audio for your CD rips for playback on your Media Center setup, who wouldn’t? Ripping audio to FLAC is the preferred method for storing audio CDs without losing any of the original detail. FLAC is known as a lossless codec, meaning there is no loss in quality between the original CD and the [...]
For whatever reason Microsoft still hasn’t mastered the art of the MP3 tag. Past versions of Windows Media Player contained an “Advanced Tag Editor” that would allow you to edit the mp3 details contained in the ID3 tag. This time around it’s part of Windows Explorer, a change that can be somewhat confusing for those used to WMP 11. [...]
Setting up your Windows 7 Media Center is easy, making it your own can be easy too. Here are 10 simple steps you can take to make your Media Center experience more complete, more personal, more enjoyable.
Add ClearQAM to Your TV Listings
Add Custom Apps to Your Extras Library
Do It Better – Add Apps with Custom Icons [...]
Playing your favorite tracks from your Music Library has never been easier than with Windows 7 Media Center. Media Center can create an atomically generated playlist of your best rated, most listened to or even recently added tracks. The steps to getting this going are simple but allow for a bit of customization.
The first step to getting your [...]
Warning: This hack modifies system files and may cause instability in certain Windows applications under atypical situations. It has been tested to the extent described in the article but not beyond.
When you’re done setting up FFDShow Audio check out this guide on setting up FFDShow Video as well.
Many enthusiasts prefer the ability to set their favorite codec for use in [...]
