William Stanek: Importing media into Windows Media Player 12 on Windows 7
William here. So yeah, I think Windows Media Player 12 for Windows 7 is pretty cool. I’ve always liked WMP but it wasn’t the one I used regularly because my music and other audio were locked into AAC and MP4. They were, and still are, the cleanest, best formats in my opinion.
Being locked in to one thing, iTunes in this case, was a real problem for a guy who digitized his entire CD library encompassing some 15 GB and over 2,000 files. Sure I could have gone WMA. WMA is a good format, especially WMA Pro. But prior to getting everything digitized at 192 Kbps under iTunes, I had been running WMP with the default bit rate (128 Kbps).
There is a large fidelity difference between 128 Kbps and 192 Kbps, and I’m probably one of the few still running a Dolby 5.1 or higher speaker setup on his computer. All I can find these days for replacements are 2.1 speaker systems. Ugh!
So how did I get my iTunes audio into WMP? Simple. In Windows Media Player, I clicked Organize, pointed to Manage Libraries, and then selected Music. This opens the Music Library Locations dialog box, shown here:
![image001[1]](https://msdntnarchive.blob.core.windows.net/media/TNBlogsFS/BlogFileStorage/blogs_msdn/microsoft_press/WindowsLiveWriter/WilliamStanekImportingmediaintoWindowsMe_9FA3/image001%5B1%5D_2.png "image001[1]")
In the Music Library Locations dialog box, I clicked Add, selected the base folder for my iTunes music, and then clicked Include Folder. When I then clicked OK to close the Music Library Locations dialog box, WMP began importing my audio—all 15 GB of it. The import process is much faster than you might imagine. My entire library was available in a few minutes and I was a happy guy.
Thanks for reading! In my next Windows Media Player discussion, I’ll talk about updating your music information and tweaking album details. There are a few other posts in the interim so stay tuned!
William R. Stanek
williamstanek at aol dot com