Quick Audio Preview in Windows XP

[garrigus]

DFreqTIP - Quick Audio Preview in Windows XP

 

Copyright 2004 by Scott R. Garrigus. Reprinted with permission.

 

** Visit DigiFreq for more great music technology tips & techniques:

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As musicians, we work with audio files on a regular basis. If you're

anything like me, you have a very large collection of audio files,

sample files, sample loops, etc. At the moment, I use Windows

Explorer to organize my collection in a number of different folders

on a dedicated hard drive. When looking for a particular file, I

like to quickly audition (listen) to the file to see if it's what I

need.

 

Unfortunately, when you try to play an audio file in Windows XP, it

defaults to loading up Windows Media Player, which is a bit time

consuming when you're searching through a number of different files.

Luckily, you can change this behavior so that Windows XP uses a

different application that loads up and plays quite quickly. Here

are the steps for making this change:

 

1) Open Windows Explorer and choose Tools > Folder Options > File

Types.

2) Scroll through the list to find the audio file type you want to

change. For this example, choose WAV.

3) Click the Advanced button.

4) Click the New button.

5) For Action type the word Preview.

6) For Application type the following exactly as shown without

quotes: "C:\Windows\System32\Mplay32.exe /Play"

7) Click OK. Click OK again. Click Close.

 

Now when you right-click on a WAV file from within Windows

Explorer, you will see a Preview option in the pop-up menu. To

preview a file, right-click and choose Preview. To close the preview

application, just hit ALT+F+X on your computer keyboard. It's much

quicker and easier to audition audio files this way under Windows

XP.

 

--

Scott R. Garrigus - Author of Cakewalk, Sound Forge and Sound Forge 6, SONAR, SONAR 2 and SONAR 3 Power! books. All books 30% off at:

http://www.garrigus.com/

 

Publisher of DigiFreq. Win a free copy of Native Instruments' INTAKT software loop sampler and learn cool music technology tips and techniques by getting a FREE subscription to DigiFreq... over 15,000 readers can't be wrong! Go to:

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[JimmieWannaB]

Great tip. This option was working on my PC once, but went away when I upgraded WMP. I would have reset it before now but didn't know the the original exe file name.

 

If you don't want to open a separate program you change the Explorer Bar view to Media. This allows you to preview audio from within Explorer.

[Phait]

I still want an Explorer-like sample browser for OS X that'll play the file once I click just the file

[garrigus]

Thanks, Jimmie! I'm glad you enjoyed the tip.

 

Phait - Yeah, that type of app would be nice. There's a feature like that within Cakewalk's Sonar, but it's not a stand-alone app.

 

Best regards,

Scott

 

--

Scott R. Garrigus - Author of Cakewalk, Sound Forge and Sound Forge 6, SONAR, SONAR 2 and SONAR 3 Power! books. All books 30% off at:

http://www.garrigus.com/

 

Publisher of DigiFreq. Win a free copy of Native Instruments' INTAKT software loop sampler and learn cool music technology tips and techniques by getting a FREE subscription to DigiFreq... over 15,000 readers can't be wrong! Go to:

http://www.digifreq.com/digifreq/

[Phait]

Well actually if you download ACD See http://www.acdsystems.com for Mac you can do this, I use it on the PC for images.. but it plays audio and video with one click (and you see thumbnails of the video)

 

However the program has launch problems on my Mac