How to burn a music CD in Windows Vista

Windows Media Player (Start > All Programs > Windows Media Player) has been transformed in Windows Vista. It's an excellent music player and organiser, and it can handle videos and DVDs too. In fact, we'll show you how you can create your own custom playlists, make CDs, copy your tunes to your PC and watch music videos without installing or using any additional software.

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Easy DJ

Media Center's interface is similar to Photo Gallery's, but you're browsing tunes rather than images. The links at the side enable you to sort your music library by album, artist, date and so on, and the views button to the left of the search bar enables you to change the way your tracks are displayed. Double-click on a track to play it.

Sort it out - Media Center's extensive sorting system means you can banish I'll Stand by You to the bottom of your track order, where it belongs.

Choose the tunes

The best way to organise your music is to create playlists, which are lists of the songs you want to hear - so you can put together a playlist that contains your favourite songs by different artists without having to hear the tracks you don't like. To create a new playlist, click on New Playlist at the top right of the window and then give your playlist a name.

Pick and choose - A playlists is like creating a mix tape, instantly. You grab whatever you want and select the play order exactly how you want it.

Add tracks

Adding tracks is a doddle: at the right of the window you'll see a panel that asks you to drag and drop tracks over it. Simply browse through your music collection and, when you find a song you want, drag it over the right hand panel. Drag and drop works inside the panel too – if you want to change the order of tracks just drag them around.

Drag'n'drop - It's not complicated; just drag the track you want to where you want it.

Change the view

By default your new playlist will appear in the panel on the right, but you can change the view by clicking on the little blue arrow at the top right of the screen. This hides the panel and displays your playlist in the main List view, where you can see and change your tracks' star ratings.

Star power - Rating tracks can help in the long-term, as it's easy to quickly select all your five star tracks and make a CD from them.

Burn it

Burning a playlist to CD couldn't be easier. Once you've collated a list, click on the Burn toolbar button. You'll see the "Insert a blank CD" message at the top right of the screen; put a blank CD in the drive and your tunes will become a shiny music CD.

Fire Damage - Don't be tempted by cheap CDs in bulk quantity if you want to keep them permanently. They tend to degrade over time.

Other options

If you click on the arrow below the Burn button you can see extra options: you can burn a data CD, which is handy if you've got a stereo that supports data discs: while a typical Audio CD stores around 12 songs, a data disc can store more than 100. You can also specify whether Media Player should level the volume (the default option) or eject the disc once the process is complete. As you'd expect, More Options takes you to the advanced settings where you can specify the burning speed and how files should be organised on a data disc.

Information overload - Unless you understand the advanced options, there's really no need to fiddle with them. The default burn button should work well enough.

Sounds better

If you click on the arrow below the Now Playing button you can access Media Player's sound enhancements, which include volume levelling, crossfading (so one track fades in as the current track ends) and the amusing Play Speed Settings, which enables you to make even the doomiest rock sound like cheery chipmunks.

Don't cross the streams - Avoid crossfading if you're copying entire albums; songs usually start and end in a particular way for a good reason.

Video vault

Media Player isn't just a music player; it's a video player too. By default the library shows your music collection, but you can switch to video by clicking on the arrow below the library button and selecting Video from the list.

See me, hear me - With the spread of broadband, video on computers has gone from a rarity to an everyday event.

Evans above

Many CDs now come with music videos as well as music, and this single - by Evanescence - is no exception. We simply copied the video from the CD to our PC, and as you can see we're watching it in Media Player in all its glory.

Opening up - If an audio CD has video on it, it might in a folder on the disc. Try searching for a movieclip on your CD drive to find it.

Dizzying DVD

Windows Media Player is as good with DVDs as it is with Cds. It's just a matter of sticking a DVD in the drive to play it. We haven't played a DVD on this PC before so Windows Vista wants to know whether it should use Media Player or Media Center for DVD discs; we'll choose Media Player.

Do you remember the first time? If you're unsure about what to select, make sure you uncheck 'Always do this for DVD movies'. You can always set this up later.

Internet lookup

Cleverly, Media Player connects to the internet, finds out what DVD you're watching and downloads cover art and the track listing - so you can find what you want by clicking on the appropriate title in the right hand panel. By default Media Center displays DVDs in full screen mode, but you can switch to windowed mode (shown here) by moving the mouse. The DVD controls will appear at the bottom of the screen and you'll see the "exit full screen mode" button in the right hand corner.

Skip to the end - When in windowed mode, you can select DVD chapters like you would audio tracks on a music playlist, which means you never have to sit through Girls Aloud singing Jump in order to watch Sound of the Underground ever again.

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