Enhancement Settings in Windows Media Player 11



If you are familiar with prior versions of Media Player, you know most of the enhancements—those items that you can optionally display at the bottom of the window that include SRS WOW Effects, a color chooser, and a graphic equalizer, among others.

To view the enhancements, right-click in a blank area of the toolbar, hover over View, hover over Enhancements, and either click Show Enhancements or click the enhancement you want to view immediately. You can scroll through enhancements with the little left- and right-arrow buttons on the enhancement display.

The enhancements include:

1) Color Chooser: This option simply allows you to tweak the color appearance of Windows Media Player 11.

2) Crossfading and Auto Volume Leveling: Auto volume leveling tries to keep songs from different CDs and artists from varying too much in volume, whereas crossfading smoothes the transitions between songs by fading out from one and overlapping with the next. You can adjust the amount of overlap that occurs with crossfading.

3) Graphic Equalizer: This 10-band equalizer allows you to adjust different frequencies of the sound, so you can increase or decrease bass, treble, or midranges. Clicking the Default item, opens a menu of a whole bunch of presets; or you can tweak the settings manually as you want.

4) Media Link for E-Mail: You can e-mail a link to a media file you are viewing or listening to on the Internet with this item. Note that you can’t use it with local media. Use Mark In to identify where to start the link, and Mark Out to identify where to stop it. You can control the playback speed with the Slow, Normal, and Fast links.

5) Play Speed Settings: You can control the speed of a media files playback with this tool. You can either use Slow, Normal, or Fast links, or use the slider itself to control playback rate.

6) Quiet Mode: Quiet Mode compresses the range of the audio sounds so that the loud sounds aren’t too much louder than the quiet ones. This feature prevents large variations in volume from blowing your speakers or waking up the kids.

7) SRS WOW Effects: SRS Labs is a company that makes various audio applications, including one called WOW. This application can enhance bass and stereo widening of the sound field in increments; you control it with the sliders.

8) Video Settings: Like a television, you can control things like hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast of your video through Media Player with the sliders in this enhancement.