Windows Media Player 12 is designed to replicate many of the features you'd see on a physical home stereo or theater system, complete with a mixer, EQ and other audio tweaking devices. The software equivalent of the myriad knobs and sliders you'd see on high end stereo equipment are called playback enhancements on Windows Media Player 12 and they are even easier to use than their physical counterparts. Using the built-in playback enhancements for Windows Media Player 12, you can adjust and optimize audio and video on the fly to best suit your situation, speaker system and tastes. In this tutorial, we'll cover how to use all of the playback enhancements in Windows Media Player 12 as well as explain a bit about how they work.

Earlier, we walked you through how to stream Windows Media Player 12 library over the Internet, which is a great way to take your movies, music and photos with you wherever you go. But for a faster, more secure way to share media between Windows 7 machines, you can also share your Windows Media Player 12 library over your HomeGroup network. This tutorial will show you how to do just that, as well as how to allow remote control of your media player and play to a networked media device.

Windows Media Player 12 has one very cool feature which allows you to play your entire media library from any Windows 7 machine over the Internet. That means everything: songs, videos, photos, even purchased media. This is useful for when you want to enjoy your Windows Media Player 12 library at the office, on your laptop or simply from another computer in your home. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to get it all up and running.

Windows Media Player 12 allows computers with built-in CD and/or DVD burners to quickly and easily create audio CDs, data CDs and Data DVDs. This functionality makes creating mix CDs and copying audio CDs for playback in car stereos and other CD players incredibly simple. Alternately, Windows Media Player 12 can burn data CDs for playback in devices that support .mp3 and .wma playback. Windows Media Player 12 can also burn pictures, songs and videos onto Data DVDs. Read on how to find out how to burn CDs and DVDs with Windows Media Player 12.

With Windows Media Player 12, you can consolidate your music collection by ripping all of your CDs and saving each song to your Library. This saves you from the tediousness of swapping out CDs and lets you play any song from your collection on demand. Windows Media Player 12 makes this process even easier on you by automatically retrieving the album information before you rip, including album artwork, artist name, album year, track names and other information. This lets you quickly organize your entire music collection with just a few clicks. In this article I will show you this process in detail.

Playing music - whether it's a digital audio file or a CD - is Windows Media Player 12's core function and most likely what you'll use it for the most. To continue our series, I will discuss how to play songs and other audio files that are in your Library as well as how to play songs that aren't in your Library. I will also explain the different Playback Modes and how each of the Playback Controls works.

The new Windows Media Player 12 elegantly pulls off the challenge of including numerous view modes and a complex library system without inundating you with options and arcane buttons. Navigating Windows Media Player 12 is surprisingly simple, given how many different ways to sort and organize your media files there are. In this tutorial, I'll walk you through the basic navigational functions that you'll need to know in order to play songs, watch videos and find media in your library.

Windows 7 ships with the new Windows Media Player 12, which looks and feels very similar to Windows Media Player 11, but with a few new tweaks and additions. The interface has been somewhat pared down and that tabbed navigation of Windows Media Player 11 has been replaced with a separate 'Now Playing' view and a collapsible, tabbed list pane on the right-hand side for playlists, burning and syncing. Perhaps most significant is the functionality with the new Windows 7 taskbar, which lets you control playback with the Windows Media Player 12 minimized. Check out the hands on tour below for a brief overview of the main features of Windows Media Player 12.