windows media player 11 windows vista

Windows Media Player 11 is loaded with smart, fun features that breathe new life into your music collection and create a much more personal entertainment experience. The new design lets you get the most out of your digital library and enjoy simple solutions for managing it all.

Discover new music

Many of the great stores that you visited in Windows Media Player 10 are available in this version of the Player as well. To find a store, just click the Browse all Online Stores option on the tab to the right of the Sync tab. The name of the tab changes depending on the menu option you select (Online Stores, Media Guide, or the name of your favorite store). See a list of stores available in Windows Media Player 11.

Media Guide and Internet radio

All of the features that you loved about the WindowsMedia.com Guide in previous versions of the Player are still available in Windows Media Player 11. The Guide offers free music videos, movie trailers, and quick access to online radio stations. To access the Guide, just click the tab to the right of the Sync tab, and then click Media Guide. Use the Internet Radio link (located in the right column of each page) to easily search for stations around the world.

Great options for ripping CDs

Do you have CDs that you want to copy into your Windows Media Player library? No problem. Windows Media Player 11 makes ripping your entire music collection fast and simple. Learn more about ripping CDs.

In addition to the current format options for ripping your music—Windows Media Audio (WMA), MP3, Windows Media Audio (Variable Bit Rate), and Windows Media Audio (Lossless)—Windows Media Player 11 introduces two new options: Windows Media Audio Pro and WAV (Lossless). For more information, see Change settings for ripping music.

SyncToy v2.0

SyncToy 2.0 for Windows is available as a free download from the Microsoft Download Center. The easy to use, customizable application helps you copy, move, rename, and delete files between folders and computers.

There are files from all kinds of sources that we want to store and manage. Files are created by our digital cameras, e-mail, cell phones, portable media players, camcorders, PDAs, and laptops. Increasingly, computer users are using different folders, drives, and even different computers (such as a laptop and a desktop) to store, manage, retrieve, and view files. Yet managing hundreds or thousands of files is still largely a manual operation. In some cases it is necessary to regularly get copies of files from another location to add to primary location; in other cases there is a need to keep two storage locations exactly in sync. Some users manage files manually, dragging and dropping from one place to another and keeping track of whether the locations are synchronized in their heads. Other users may use two or more applications to provide this functionality.

Now there is an easier way. SyncToy, a free PowerToy for Microsoft Windows, is an easy to use, highly customizable program that helps users to do the heavy lifting involved with the copying, moving, and synchronization of different directories. Most common operations can be performed with just a few clicks of the mouse, and additional customization is available without additional complexity. SyncToy can manage multiple sets of folders at the same time; it can combine files from two folders in one case, and mimic renames and deletes in another case. Unlike other applications, SyncToy actually keeps track of renames to files and will make sure those changes get carried over to the synchronized folder.

We have collected feedback from the discussion forum on the Windows XP Professional Photography web site, from customer feedback surveys, from a large number of professional and hobbyist photographers at Microsoft, and from various world-wide forums, sites, reviews, and blogs on the web. Based on your feedback, the following features were added to this release of SyncToy:

• Dynamic Drive Letter Assignment: Drive letter reassignment will now be detected and updated in the folder pair definition.
• True Folder Sync: Folder creates, renames, and deletes are now synchronized for all SyncToy actions.
• Exclusion Filtering Based on Name: File exclusion based on name with exact or fuzzy matching.
• Filtering Based on File Attributes: The ability to exclude files based on one or more file attributes (Read-Only, System, Hidden).
• Unattended Folder Pair Execution: Addressed issues related to running scheduled folder pairs while logged off.
• Folder Pairs With Shared Endpoints: Ability for folder pairs associated with the same or different instances of SyncToy to share end-points.
• Command line enhancements: Added the ability to manage folder pairs via the command line interface.
• Re-Architect Sync Engine: The SyncToy engine has been rearchitected to provide scalability and the ability to add significant enhancements in future releases.
• Sync engine is also more robust insomuch that many single, file level errors are skipped without affecting the entire sync operation.
• Sync Encrypted Files: Sync of Encrypted files works when local folder and files are encrypted, which addresses the common scenario involving sync between local, encrypted laptop PC folder and remote, unencrypted desktop PC folder.
• 64-Bit Support: SyncToy now has a native 64-bit build (x64 only) for 64-bit versions of Windows.
• Folder pair rename
• Sub-folder Exclusion Enhancements: Descendents created under excluded sub-folders are automatically excluded. Usability improvements for the sub-folder exclusion dialog.
• Folder Pair Metadata Moved: Folder pair metadata removed from MyDocuments to resolve any issues with server-based folder pair re-direction setup.
• Setup Improvements: Integrated setup with single self-extracting archive file and no extra downloads if you already have .NET Framework 2.0 installed. Enabled silent install for the SyncToy Installer file (see readme.txt file for more information). Removed combine and subscribe actions.
• Removed combine and subscribe actions.

Note: We've taken great care to ensure that this tool operates as it should, but it is not part of Windows and is not supported by Microsoft Technical Support. For this reason, Microsoft Technical Support is unable to answer questions about SyncToy. To speak to other users and contribute feedback about your experiences with SyncToy, please use the forums.

HD Photo Plug-ins for Photoshop are Released

HD Photo Plug-ins for Photoshop are Released

HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 and CS3 have been officially released for both Windows and OSX. They're available now from the Microsoft Download Center.

Here are the separate downloads for Windows and OSX.

The Windows version is supported on Windows XP and Windows Vista, and works with Photoshop CS2 and CS3. While not officially supported, it will also work with limited features with older versions of Photoshop and with Photoshop Elements. The included README file has details.

The OSX version works with both 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard), and supports Photoshop CS2 and CS3.

The features supported on Windows and OSX are identical. The files created with either version are fully compatible with each other and with Windows Vista, Windows Live Photo Gallery, the HD Photo Device Porting Kit, and several other applications that support HD Photo.

I previously posted information about the features provided in the plug-in and an overview of the encoder parameters and what they do. Take a look at previous blog entries here and here. I also gave a presentation at WinHEC 2007 about HD Photo Best Practices. While targeted primarily for hardware developers, the presentation contains a lot of information that may be useful for Photoshop users that want to best optimize their encoder parameters. You can find a copy of the presentation here: WinHEC 2007: HD Photo Implementation Guidelines.

If you've been using the beta version released last summer, you won't find anything new here (other than the removal of the expiration date and the absence of BETA in the name.) All the changes we've made since the last beta are under the covers, fixing a couple minor bugs, addressing several theoretical security vulnerabilities and generally bringing the code up to current Microsoft standards for released software. But on the surface, the released plug-ins look and act identical to the most recent betas. Don't forget that the BETA versions will expire on December 31st, so you should definitely download and install these new released versions.

Once again, I'd like to acknowledge and thank Pegasus Imaging Systems for their participation in the development of these plug-ins.

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools provides a set of tools for photographers to perform various tasks with their images—including RAW captures. The current version enables you to quickly geotag your photos, view and edit metadata, and more, leveraging the power of Windows and Microsoft Live Local.

New in Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2

• Support for reading and writing metadata to/from XMP side cars so that metadata will interoperate with Adobe products. This is in addition to reading and writing from the file.
• Users can convert from RAW to JPEG, TIFF, and HD Photo using "As Shot" settings. This includes the ability to resize the image.
• Users can view actual RAW image in addition to thumbnails
• Support for 64-bit Windows
• Support for international locales
• Improved UI for geotagging

Pro Photo Tools includes the following features:

Geotagging with flexibility

As geotagging gains popularity, photographers want to be able to quickly identify the location for their images. With Pro Photo Tools, you can gather location information from a variety of sources and apply it to the metadata in your images.

Determine location name automatically

With Pro Photo Tools, you can automatically apply the actual name of the location where a photo was taken based on the GPS coordinates. Instead of numbers, you'll have the "real" names, and that information can then be saved in the metadata for your photos.

Determine GPS coordinates from location name

Just because you haven't always had a GPS receiver doesn't mean you can't assign GPS coordinates to your photos. In fact, using the power of Microsoft Live Local you can determine the GPS coordinates where any photo was taken based on location name information in the image metadata. The GPS coordinates can then be added to the metadata for your photos and the photos plotted on a map.

Identify location on a map

For the maximum in flexibility when assigning a location to an image, you can navigate to the precise location where you took a given photo and tag the photo with that location information based on a specific position on the map.

View images on a map

As cool as it is to have GPS coordinate information connected to your images, to really get a sense of place with your photos, you need to view them on a map. Pro Photo Tools utilizes Windows Live Local to display your images on a map of the world, including the ability to view your images on a normal map or a satellite view of the world.

Edit image metadata

Metadata has become increasingly important to photographers as a way to manage and organize their images. Among the many things it enables is a rich capability to search for images. You can now update a wide range of metadata for your images using Pro Photo Tools, and that metadata gets stored in the actual image file, so wherever your photo goes, your data goes.

RAW support

By leveraging the Windows Imaging Components (WIC), we're able to provide support for any RAW file format (in addition to TIFF and JPEG) for which a codec has been developed. And that includes most RAW file formats. Not only can you view your RAW images within Pro Photo Tools, you can also update metadata—including GPS coordinates—directly in the file. The updated metadata is stored within the RAW file, not in a cumbersome "sidecar" file. (For information on obtaining codecs for your RAW images or other file formats, visit Codecs for Windows.

Extensibility

Pro Photo Tools was built with extensibility in mind. Rather than creating a one-off tool, we created a framework we can leverage for future tools. This will allow us to add additional functionality in future versions of Pro Photo Tools more efficiently. That means you'll get more features sooner.

For more information on how to use Microsoft Pro Photo Tools, see the article Geotagging Goes Mainstream.