Windows 7 / Getting Started

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Managing Music Properties

Windows 7 lets you sort your music files by various file details, such as name, contributing artists, album, track number (#), and title. You can also sort by a slew of additional properties, including year, genre, length, composer, and even beats-per-minute (great if you want to string together a bunch of same-tempo songs for a dance mix).

Most of this information is added automatically by your music player program when you rip a CD, or included with the files you download from online music stores. You can, however, edit this information or enter additional information manually, using either a tag editor program (discussed previously) or from within Windows.

If you want to edit tracks within Windows, you have to do each file individually. Here's how it works:

1. From within Windows Explorer, navigate to and right-click the track you want to edit.
2. Select Properties from the pop-up menu.
3. When the Properties dialog box appears, select the Details tab.
4. Select a given property and enter a value.
5. Click OK.

There are a lot of different music properties available, most of them quite useful, as detailed in Table.

Available Music Properties

Type of Property	Properties Available
Description	Title, Subject, Rating,Tags, Comments
Media	Contributing Artists, Album Artist, Album,Year, # (track number), Genre, Length
Audio	Bit rate
Origin	Publisher, Encoded By, Author URL, Copyright
Content	Parental Rating Reason, Composers, Conductors, Group Description, Mood, Part of Set, Initial Key, Beats-per-Minute, Protected
File	Name, Item Type, Folder Path, Date Created, Date Modified, Size, Attributes, Offline Availability, Offline Status, Shared With, Owner, Computer

These attributes are used by your music player program (and portable music player devices) to organize music, create playlists, and the like. For example, you can easily sort your music in Windows Media Player by artist, album, genre, and year. So if you want to play only tracks by Bruce Springsteen, or music released in the year 2005, or blues tracks, you can do so-as long as those attributes are included in your music files.