by Matt Skibbs
Because the music and photo experiences in Media Center for Windows 7 have changed quite a bit from Vista, I wanted to do a brief overview of some of the changes and discuss how to take advantage of the new functionality. I know that many TGBers have been using a pre-release version of Windows 7, and already familiar with these features :) For those of you still using Vista, here’s a look at what’s coming up:
That’s My Mom’s Most Favorite Media!
Play Favorites lets you quickly jump in to listen to your favorite music or watch a slide show with your favorite photos, directly from the start menu, without having to browse around the galleries. It is very flexible and can be configured to suit your needs by generating playlists from highly rated content, recently added media, existing playlists, auto-playlists, etc.
Personally, I love to use recently added and highly rated content – I get a great mix of new content and old favorites this way and I never have to worry about a playlist getting stale. Play Favorites has replaced Play All in the Start Menu, but if you’d like to use Play All you can still find it in the music gallery. We’ve also made performance improvements from Vista so that Play All is very snappy on large libraries (Play Favorites is too)!
Mmmmm This IS a Tasty Music Experience
The Music Now Playing experience has new layouts and animations, plus some new functionality. The foreground album art will be high resolution (~400x400), if your track contains high-res embedded album art, and it looks substantially sharper than Vista when blown up on a big screen.
We’ve introduced a few new background modes for the music experience that pull album art from your local and mapped watched music folders:
- Album art grid that slowly scrolls downwards (Only available on the PC & 360)
- Album art grid that does not move, with random tiles swapped in-place
- Normal blue background with spotlights
If you’d like to manually select a specific Now Playing background mode, you may do so at Tasks | Settings | Music | Now Playing. From the Now Playing experience, you can right-click or select “More Info” on the remote to jump to Settings easily.
You Got the Wrong Slide Show. I’m the Ambient Slide Show, Man.
We’ve added a great new photo experience on the PC, the Ambient Slide Show, which will fly over a wall of thumbnails and randomly zoom in on one of them then either move to another tile, swap images in-place, zoom-out, etc. The Ambient Slide Show can be started via Play Favorites on the Start Menu (see next section), from Play Photos within the Music experience, or automatically as a Media Center screen saver.
If you’d like to modify the screen saver settings, visit Tasks | Settings | Pictures | Slide Show Screen Saver. The classic slide show is meant for more traditional viewing and can display photos in a specific order. It also lets the user interact with the current photo (rate, view details, rotate, next, previous, etc.). The Ambient Slide Show is meant to be a background experience that offers a very elegant way to randomly view your photos, but does not support any user interaction – think of it as a really slick screen saver that is great eye candy for casual viewing!
No One Ever Rates on Their First Click. Yeah, but What if he Does?
While in the Music experience or Classic Slide Show, you can now hit 0-5 on the remote control to rate the current item – very convenient! A new browse pivot for ratings has been introduced in the galleries, so that you can easily find media that you’ve rated. I find that I tend to rate a lot more media since it is so easy now, which was the goal of this change. Now that we can configure Play Favorites to generate dynamic playlists with your highly rated content, the more content you rate the better Play Favorites will work!
One Playlist to Rule Them All
It’s pretty easy to access your favorite content in Windows 7 using Play Favorites, but what if you want to save different music and photo combinations – such as a slideshow of your trip to Los Angeles with a specific sound track? In Windows 7 this is simple to accomplish, you can now add both music and photos to playlists that you create:
- Go to the Picture Library and navigate to the <slide shows> pivot.
- Create a slide show.
- Name your slide show.
- Select Picture Library or Music Library.
- Browse for photos or songs
- Click Add More and find additional media
- Repeat steps 4-6 as needed to generate a list that contains both songs and photos
- Click Create when you have all of the photos and music you want selected.
If you have any questions or comments, please post them below -
Thanks,
Matt
About the Author
Matt Skibbs is a Software Development Engineer on the Media Center Core Team and works on Media Experiences. Matt was a Media Center enthusiast prior to joining the Media Center team over a year ago. He lives on the Seattle eastside with his West Highland Terrier that is named after Tobias on Arrested Development.
