Recording an Audio Clip from CD

You can insert an audio clip to your Word document or Excel spreadsheet. Here is the procedure to record an audio clip from CD audio (music):

Double-click the speaker icon at the right corner of Taskbar and once again double- click the speaker icon. Two Volume Control dialog boxes will appear on the screen. Click the Options-Properties menu from one of the dialog boxes, select the Recording option at the Adjust volume for area. Only the CD input option can be selected, all other options such as MIDI input, Line-In, and Microphone must be removed.

Run the CD-Player and Sound Recorder applications. Play your favorite song on the CD Player, and then click the circle button in the Sound Recorder to start recording the song. To stop recording, press the rectangle button. The same method can be used to record the sounds from MIDI, AVI or MPEG files.

Playing WAV Quickly

Windows 98/95 use the Sound Recorder application to play all sound files with WAV format. Unfortunately, this method is too slow for big size files since Sound Recorder needs to load the complete file into the computer memory. To get around this situation, you can associate the WAV file with Media Player application. Just perform these steps:

Run Windows Explorer, and then select one of your WAV files. Click the View - Options menu and go to the File Types tab. In the list, find the WAVE SOUND item (or Sound Clip), and click the Edit button. In the Actions column select Open, click Edit, and then type c:\windows\mplayer.exe. Click OK, in the Actions column select Play, click Edit, and then type c:\windows\mplayer.exe /play /close.

Starting from now on, if you click on a WAV file, the Media Player will play it.

Playing a Single Track CD

Windows 9X/Me allows you to play a single track of Audio CD. To do so, open the Windows Explorer, and then click the CD-ROM drive icon. Before you do that, make sure you have inserted an audio CD into the drive.

On the right-pane of your Windows Explorer, you will see Track01.cda to Track??.cda. You can click one of those tracks to start playing. The track also can be played automatically by double-clicking their icons. Try to drag a track into the Windows 9X/Me desktop to create its shortcut. Rename this shortcut with the title of the songs. From now on, you can play that song (as long as the audio CD has inserted) by double-clicking its shortcut. You also can place this kind of shortcut in the Start menu or a special folder.

Playing a MIDI file on Windows 9X/Me Welcome

Bored with your Windows 9X/Me's welcome sound? Try to change that sound with your favorites MIDI files. Open the Control Panel, double-click on the Sounds icon to open the Sound Properties dialog box. Delete the sound reference for "Start Windows" events by selecting "none" option.

Next, create a shortcut to a .MID file. Put this shortcut in the C:\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp folder. If you do not want the applications that are used to play the MIDI file to appear every time you start Windows 9X/Me, right-click on the shortcut, and then click Properties. Click on the Shortcut tab, and then choose "Minimized" from the Run box.

Move CD Player Settings to Another Computer

You can transfer the Artist, Track, and Title settings on your CD Player to another computer by copying the Cdplayer.ini file to the other computer. To do so, copy the Cdplayer.ini file from the Windows folder to a floppy disk and then copy it to the Windows folder on the other computer. If the computers are connected to a network, use the network to copy the file from the Windows folder on one computer to the Windows folder on the other computer.

If there is already a Cdplayer.ini file in the Windows folder on the second computer, rename it before you copy the file from the first computer or you will overwrite the existing file. You can also merge the contents of two Cdplayer.ini files using the Copy and Paste commands in Notepad.

Editing Multimedia Files

It is not a secret that you can play all types of multimedia files on the Media Player. However, do you know that you can place Media player's object, such as video clips, into the clipboard and then paste it into a document? To do so, first you have to mark the beginning and the end of your selection. To mark the beginning of a clip, click the Start Selection button. To mark the end of a clip, click the End Selection button. Finally, click the Edit-Copy menus to paste your clip into the clipboard.

Count Frames

Windows keeps count of dropped frames during video playback. To display this feature, after you have played a video clip, hold Ctrl and press F5. A box called "Send MCI String Command" will appear on the screen. In the Command box type "Status Frames Skipped" and click Send. Windows will tell you how many total frames were displayed.

NOTICE: You need to use Mplayer.exe (located in your Windows folder), the default Windows (multi) Media Player to access the frame rate options. Mplayer.exe can play (among other media file formats): .AVI, MOV, MMV, .MPG, .MPEG, .MPE, .MID, .RMI, .WAV, .FLI, .FLC etc. Don't use it on the Windows Media Player (Wmplayer.exe) in Windows Millennium, since this tip will not work.