Media Player

Media Player is the default audio and video app in Windows 11 and the modern replacement for Windows Media Player. It lets you play downloaded and locally stored audio and video files and can help you manage your personal music and video collections. This can include content you’ve purchased online, ripped from CD, DVD, or Blu-ray, or downloaded from the Internet and now store on your PC or on other PCs on your home network.

Tip: Windows Media Player Legacy is still available in Windows 11 if you’re nostalgic for the early 2000s.

Tip: Media Player can only manage or play content that is unprotected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. So it cannot access the movies and other videos you may have purchased from online services like Apple or Google or music from subscription music services like Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

Defaults

Media Player is the default in-box app for audio and video files (in .aac, .mp3, .flac, .m4a, .mp4, and many other formats) in Windows 11. In this role, the app is adequate and works as expected.

Media Player can also be used to manage local music and video collections, an infrequent need these days thanks to the popularity of music streaming services. If you maintain local music and video collections, it’s unlikely that Media Player will meet your needs, but it monitors your Music and Video folders by default and populates the related views in the app with that content.

Customize

Media Player is a simple app with a modern design. There’s little you can do to customize the app layout, as the navigation bar on the left is non-resizable and will automatically collapse as needed when the window resizes. But you can’t toggle the navigation bar between expanded and collapsed views, nor can you toggle or resize the playback controls area at the bottom.

To customize Media Player, open the app’s settings by clicking the “Settings” (“gear”) button at the bottom of the navigation bar.

The following settings are of note:

• Music library locations. By default, Media Player will monitor your Music folder (C:\Users\user-name\Music) for content. You can add a new folder to monitor by clicking “Add folder.” Or you can expand this item to view or remove the folders it monitors.
• Video library locations. This works identically to the Music library, except that the app looks for videos only in your Videos folder (C:\Users\user-name\Videos) by default. You can remove and add locations here as needed, of course.
• App theme. Like many other Windows 11 apps, Media Player uses the system-wide color mode (Light theme or Dark theme) that you configure in the Settings app in Personalization > Colors by default. But you can change that here.
• Accent color. Media Player is also unique among the in-box Windows 11 apps in that it uses its own fun accent color, called “Zest,” by default. But you can configure the app to use the system accent color like other apps if you prefer.
• Media info. Media Player is designed to connect to an online database to look up any missing album and artist art when possible. If you would prefer it not to do so, you can disable this feature. But as of 2026, this functionality no longer works.

Access and manage a local music library

If you have a local music collection, you can access and manage it using the Music library view in Media Player.

There are three tabs at the top of this view:

• Songs. This default view is an alphabetical list of your songs, grouped by letter. You can sort the view in other ways and filter it by genre using the small controls in the upper-right.

• Albums. This view displays your albums with graphical thumbnails, also alphabetical and grouped by letter. You can sort the view in other ways and filter it by genre using the small controls in the upper-right.

• Artists. This strange looking view displays artist thumbnails in circles, also alphabetical and grouped by letter. There are no sorting or filtering options in this view.

You can play music from any of these views: When you mouse-over any item, a “Play” button appears.

Each view also provides a “Select” button when you mouse-over an item so you can multi-select items and then use a pop-up toolbar to perform actions–“Play,” “Play next,” and more–on all of them.

The items displayed in Albums and Artists also display a “More options” (“…”) button when you mouse over them. This displays a menu of options that differs by view. In the Albums view, for example, there are options like “Edit info,” “Show album,” “Show artist,” and others.

Display an album or artist

You can display an album or artist on its own page by clicking it in the appropriate view.

Tip: You can also right-click any item in any view and choose “Show album” or “Show artist” from the menu that appears.

An album view displays album art and other information about the album, “Play all,” “Shuffle and play,” “+ Add to,” and “Edit info” buttons, and each song in the album in order. These views are a bit dynamic, too, in that if you scroll past the bottom of the view, the header area with the album art, information, and buttons contracts a bit to give the song list more space.

An artist view works similarly but provides an artist thumbnail if available, artist information, “Play all,” “Shuffle and play,” and “+ Add to” buttons, and a set of thumbnails of the albums you have by that artist.

You can change the view from album thumbnails to a list so you can see the contents of each album here. Or, you can just click an album thumbnail to display its album page.

Control music playback

To play music, click the “Play” button associated with a song, album, or artist. The item will begin playing and the playback controls at the bottom will display album art if possible and allow you to access various features. If you are in the Songs view or viewing an album, the currently playing song is highlighted there as well.

From here, you can do the following:

• View Now playing. To access the Now Playing view, click the album art in the left of the playback controls area. To return to the normal display, click the “Back” button in the upper-left of the app.

• Access the playback controls. Media Player offers all the expected playback controls in the middle bottom of the window, including “Shuffle On/Off”, “Previous”, “Play/Pause”, “Next”, and “Repeat Off/All/One” buttons and a scrubber to move to an arbitrary point in the content you’re enjoying.
• Adjust the volume. The “Volume” button displays a vertical volume slider so you can adjust the playback volume separately from the system-wide volume in Windows 11.
• View Now playing full-screen. To display the Now Playing view in full-screen, click the “Full screen” button. (You can exit full-screen similarly.)
• Use the mini-player. If you start playing music and want to quickly access playback controls while doing other things on your PC, you can click the “Mini player” button in the lower right of the app window. This shrinks the app down to a small window that will always stay on top of other windows. Playback controls appear when the song changes or you mouse over the mini-player.

• Access the equalizer and other playback controls. The “More options” (“…”) at the far right of the playback controls area lets you access an equalizer, playback speed controls, and other playback options.

 

You can navigate through the app and access additional features as needed while music is playing. There’s also a dedicated Play queue view in the navigation bar so you can see the list of songs that are currently playing. Here, you can add and remove songs, rearrange songs with drag and drop, manually switch to a different song, and clear the queue.

Tip: Click “Clear” in the Play queue view to remove any content in the play queue. This works with music and videos.

You can also impact the play queue from other views. For example, you can right-click a song in any view and select items like “Play” and “Play next” to change the play queue.

Edit song or album information

Media Player is not a particularly sophisticated app, and it’s likely that anyone managing a local music collection will use a third-party app to edit song or album information. That said, you can do this with Media Player if desired: Just right-click any item and choose “Edit info.” (Or, select the item and click “Edit info” in the toolbar that appears.)

The options you can edit vary. With a song, you can edit meta data like its title, contributing and album artist, album, and so on.

With an album, you can edit its name, genre, year, and individual song track number, title, and contributing artist. You can also add or change the album art by mousing-over it and clicking the “Change album art” (pencil) button that appears.

Tip: That “Update album info online” button no longer works as of 2026.

Create and manage playlists

Media Player also lets you make and manage your own playlists via the Playlists view accessible from the navigation bar. Playlists are lists of songs that can be played together as a group, like the modern version of a mix tape. That is, they’re a way for you to organize songs and videos you like, or that go together well.

Tip: You can also use videos in playlists, though this is less common.

Tip: Once you create one or more playlists, they will appear under Playlists in the navigation pane for quick access.

Common playlist-related tasks include:

Create a new playlist. To create a new playlist, navigate to the Playlists view and click “+ Create a new playlist.” Alternatively, select one or more songs in any view and choose “+ Add to” > “+ New playlist.” Each playlist you create appears in the Playlists view.

Add content to a playlist. To add a song, album, artist, or some selection of items to a playlist, select it if necessary (or right-click it) and choose “+ Add to” > “name of playlist“.

View, access, or manage a playlist. To view, access, or manage a playlist, select it in the Playlists view or under Playlists in the navigation bar. Here, you rename or delete the playlist, play it, reorder the songs it contains using drag-and-drop, and access per-item options by right-clicking them.

Access and manage a local video library

If you have a local video collection, you can access and manage it using the Video library view in Media Player. There are two tabs, All videos and Video folders, though these will be identical unless you configured Media Player to monitor multiple folders. Each view displays thumbnails for the contained videos, and you can sort the view alphabetically (the default) or by date modified.

Video management works much like music management: Each item displays a “More options” button when you mouse over, and you can click this button to display a list of applicable actions. You can also multi-select items and choose from a shorter list of actions you can perform on them.

While playing a video, Media Player switches to Dark mode and provides a different set of playback options in the playback controls than is the case with music.

Unique controls here include:

Languages and subtitles. Click this button to choose between any subtitles, language tracks, and/or audio options (like stereo and surround), if available.

More options. This item displays a menu that includes an “Edit with Clipchamp” option and a “Video settings” sub-menu with “Rotate video,” “Zoom to fill,” and “Video enhancements,” the latter of which lets you manually control the brightness, contrast, saturation, and hue of the playback.

During playback, the play queue is replaced with just that one video. And a thumbnail of the video will appear in the Now playing thumbnail in the lower left corner of the app window if you return to the library management interface. This lets you switch back to Now playing when needed.