WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER 9 OR ABOVE UPGRADE
WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER 9 OR ABOVE FULL

The program even remembers which songs you play often and which you hardly play at all, and it automatically organizes your library based on those preferences.

Like Apple iTunes, Windows Media Player 9.0 lets you rate songs on a one- to five-star scale, so you can create automatic playlists made of your favorite tunes. For example, you can create playlists of tracks that you generally listen to at night or put together the best songs for road trips. Auto Playlists, which work off your songs' ID3 tags to create lists of music, let you easily switch up your tunes depending on your mood. Many of the new features in Media Player 9.0 are designed to make organizing, managing, and playing your libraries of ripped CD tracks, downloaded music, and videos easier.

WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER 9 OR ABOVE FULL

If you like, you can view visualizations and videos on the full screen. You can also access videos, album info, or eye-candy visualizations from an optional window that's nice for background work. Version 9.0 builds on the standard interface of its predecessors, but you can now shrink the player so that controls appear on the Windows taskbar. If you choose the default off setting, you can make unlimited copies, but you'll be reminded to 'engage in legal copying.' If you choose to activate this feature, you can rip CDs to secure Windows Media files only, meaning that the songs can be played on only your computer and can't be copied. When you start Windows Media Player 9.0 for the first time, you'll be asked to specify whether you want copy protection on or off. Windows Media Player automatically grabs all the tagging information if you have an online connection. Importing songs from CDs is as simple as inserting a disc and clicking the Copy button. From there, installation was no sweat the wizard does most of the work for you. Both programs took us just a few seconds to download over a cable modem. Before you download the player, you'll need to choose between the 98/2000/Me version and the XP edition. But if you own an older OS, don't rush the most attractive goodies are reserved for XP users.

WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER 9 OR ABOVE UPGRADE

Even so, we still think that it makes good sense to upgrade to this media megastar. While it touts an improved look and better media-management skills-the very same found in September's beta, by the way-version 9.0 has one big fault: It won't let you encode CD audio tracks in the MP3 format unless you pay for a third-party plug-in. Windows Media Player 9.0 beats the pants off of older versions of the app, both in terms of playback quality and features.

Windows media player 9 or above