Dear List I think I want to mount a case for using Media Player Classic as a default media player with Jaws. Over the years I had lots of problems with Winamp, the application seems intrusive and relatively hungry on resources. I found it would often crash and I would find unwanted extras like Winamp Agent and Dashboard etc installed.
Media Player Classic in contrast is light, small with a simple clean menu interface and as solid as a rock. I have installed it on loads of systems and have never come across a problem yet. I do not worry about winamp type libraries etc and simply play my music and other media from windows Explorer. I thought that I would have to sacrifice some of the features of WinAmp that Jaws support but thought I would tell you of some basic tinkering which results in Media Player Classic meeting all my needs. 1. Information on time elapsed, bit rate etc. You cannot simply read all this information from the menu bar in Media Player Classic though the properties tab under the file menu will give you a lot of information. To get information like time elapsed etc you can make some changes which means this is easily displayed in a window that Jaws can read . Go to the view menu and select all the information you want displayed. This includes statistics information status options etc. I normally turn them all on . This information can now be read with the Jaws Cursor by simply cursoring up and down through the Media Player Classic Window. To make this process even better you can stop Jaws announcing Graphic as a one time customisation. Press insert F2 and open configuration manager whilst in Media Player Classic. Open the set options menu and go to graphics and symbols and tab down to make sure that the Graphics verbosity is set to none. Exit and save configuration Manager. You will now find information about your tracks playing will be read clearly without Jaws saying graphics. Use insert R to cycle through different read restrictions and set restriction to application if too much is being read from other open applications on your screen. 2. all the controls in Media Player classic are now intuitive. Play pause is space bar, up and down volume is by the up and down cursor keys and fast forward and rewind can be achieved at different speeds by using control left and right arrows or alt and left and right arrows respectively . All other commands are available through a simple menu system. 3. although I have found no inbuilt Playlist creation support in Media Player Classic, I use a small partner application called Mp3Tag to quickly achieve this. This can be downloaded from the Jaws User Programs page. To create a playlist of all the files in a folder open Mp3Tag. Press Control D for Directory . Navigate to the folder where your Mp3 files are. Press Control P for Playlist , press enter a couple of time and a playlist file has been created in the folder with the mp3 files . This playlist file can be open by media player classic. If Media Player Classic is not your default playlist player and you want it to be so follow these instructions. Simply press the application key on the playlist file and select open with. Go down to choose program from the resulting sub menu. Select browse if media player classic is not displayed in the list and find mplayer.exe in the Media Player Classic folder. . Now check always open with this application and media player classic will play the playlist from Windows explorer. Pressing the page up and page down keys will move you between tracks in the playlist. 4. It should also be noted that Media Player Classic can be used to play Real Media and Quicktime files through ?Real and Quicktime alternative application, both of which bundle Media Player Classic as their default player for these formats. 5,. I have never yet found a sound or video format that I cannot open with Media Player classic. The word classic in the title makes it sound old fashioned but it seems very up to date with codec's. It opens without problems files that both Winamp and Windows Media Player has not coped with . I realise this is unlikely to convert devotees of Winamp but may help those, like me, who got very frustrated with this increasingly bloated application. If you are looking for a free alternative to WinAmp this may help. Regards David Griffith For answers to frequently asked questions about this list visit: http://www.jaws-users.com/help/
