Media Player

The Media Player app lets you access your personal music and video collections. This can include any combination of content that you've purchased online (music only for the most part), 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.
Media Player can only access content that is unprotected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. So it cannot display the movies and other videos you may have purchased from online services like Apple, Google, or the Microsoft Store. Nor can it play music from subscription music services like Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube Music.
You can use the Movies & TV app to access movies or TV shows you've purchased from Microsoft.

Where did it go?
Media Player is the successor to Groove Music, which was itself the successor to Xbox Music. In the years since these apps were an ongoing concern, Microsoft has removed most of the functionality that made them interesting, including streaming music from OneDrive, an online music store, and a music service called Groove Music Pass. Today, Media Player is designed so that you can play your own local content only.
Get to know Media Player
Media Player is a basic, straightforward app. As with many of the other apps built into Windows 11, it features a collapsible navigation pane on the left and a larger area for content. But because of its function as a media player, it also includes unique playback controls on the bottom.

Here is a quick rundown of the major experiences offered by Media Player.

Home. Here, you can quickly access the media you've most recently enjoyed.

Music library. This view lets you access the music files you have in connected folders.

Video library. This view displays the video content you have in connected folders.

Play queue. This view helps you manage the play queue, the list of content that is currently playing.

Playlists. Media Player lets you make and manage your own playlists of music and/or videos, lists of content 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 you like, or that go together well.

Configure Media Player
Most Windows 11 users can safely ignore Media Player. But if you have locally stored music or video libraries, this app isn't a bad solution for accessing that content. And you should spend a few minutes configuring the app, mostly so that it knows where to find your content.

To do so, click the "Settings" button at the bottom of the navigation bar. Media Player settings appears.

Here, you can make the following customizations.

Music library locations. By default, Media Player is configured to look for music files in your Music folder (C:\Users[user-name]\Music). (You can see this by expanding the Music library locations item in settings.) You can remove existing locations or, by clicking the "Add folder" bu...

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