Windows 8.1: The Missing Manual

Music Playback

You can sort your collection by performer, album, year released, or whatever, just by clicking the corresponding icons in the navigation tree. Whenever you want to play back some music, just click your way to the song or album you want—there’s no need to hunt around in your shoeboxes for the original CD the songs came from.

But that’s just the beginning of Media Player’s organizational tools; see Figure 18-3.

Figure 18-3. On the Library tab, the navigation tree (left) lists your playlists. Under the Music heading, you see various ways to sort your collection. The button just to the left of the search box changes the layout in the central window: List view, Icon view, and so on. Don’t miss the search box at the top, which searches all text related to your songs and videos as you type, hiding entries that don’t match.

You can pick something to listen to in a couple of different ways:

• Under Music in the navigation pane, click Artist, Album, or Genre. Double-click an album cover to see what songs are on that album. Double-click a song to start playing it.

• Use the Search command to find a song, composer, album, or band.

When you’ve found something worth listening to, double-click to start playback. You can use the space bar to start and stop playback.

Tip

If you point to a song without clicking, a little Preview bubble pops up. Click the button to hear a 15-second snippet of it; ...