Editing Windows Media Player (section)

===Core playback and library functions===
Windows Media Player supports playback of audio, video and pictures, along with fast forward, reverse, file markers (if present) and variable playback speed (seek & time compression/dilation introduced in WMP 9 Series). It supports local playback, streaming playback with multicast streams and progressive downloads. Items in a playlist can be skipped over temporarily at playback time without removing them from the playlist. Full keyboard-based operation is possible in the player.

Windows Media Player supports full media management, via the integrated media library introduced first in version 7, which offers cataloguing and searching of media and viewing media metadata. Media can be arranged according to album, artist, genre, date ''et al.'' Windows Media Player 9 Series introduced Quick Access Panel to browse and navigate the entire library through a menu. The Quick Access Panel was also added to the mini-mode in version 10 but was entirely removed in version 11. WMP 9 Series also introduced ratings and Auto Ratings. Windows Media Player 10 introduced support for aggregating pictures, Recorded TV shows, and other media into the library. A fully featured tag editor was featured in versions 9-11 of WMP, called the Advanced Tag Editor. However, the feature was removed in Windows Media Player 12. Since WMP 9 Series, the player features dynamically updated ''Auto Playlists'' based on criteria. Auto Playlists are updated every time users open them. WMP 9 Series and later also supports ''Auto Ratings'' which automatically assigns ratings based on the number of times a song is played. Pre-populated auto playlists are included in Windows Media Player 9 Series. Custom Auto Playlists can be created only on [[Windows XP]] and later.

In Windows Media Player 11, the ''Quick Access Panel'' was removed and replaced with an Explorer-style navigation pane on the left which can be customized for each library to show the user selected media or metadata categories, with contents appearing on the right, in a graphical manner with thumbnails featuring album art or other art depicting the item. Missing album art can be added directly to the placeholders in the Library itself (though the program re-renders all album art imported this way into 1x1 pixel ratio, 200x200 resolution [[JPEG]]s). There are separate ''Tiles'', ''Icons'', ''Details'' or ''Extended Tiles'' views for ''Music'', ''Pictures'', ''Video'' and ''Recorded TV'' which can be set individually from the navigation bar. Entries for ''Pictures'' and ''Video'' show their thumbnails. Version 11 also introduced the ability to search and display results on-the-fly as characters are being entered, without waiting for ''Enter'' key to be hit. [[Incremental search]] results are refined based on further characters that are typed. ''Stacking'' allows graphical representations of how many albums there are in a specific category or folder. The pile appears larger as the category contains more albums. The List pane includes an option to prompt the user to remove items skipped in a playlist upon save or skip them only during playback.