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User Overview

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[The feature associated with this page, Windows Media Player SDK, is a legacy feature. It has been superseded by MediaPlayer. MediaPlayer has been optimized for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft strongly recommends that new code use MediaPlayer instead of Windows Media Player SDK, when possible. Microsoft suggests that existing code that uses the legacy APIs be rewritten to use the new APIs if possible.]

To the user, visualizations are images that dance in time to the music. They provide additional entertainment to enhance musical experiences. The more entertaining a visualization is, the better!

A typical visualization appears as shown in the following illustration.

typical visualization

Standard Visualizations

Windows Media Player includes several visualizations, such as the following:

  • Ambience
  • Plenoptic
  • Spike

Standard Presets

In addition, each visualization comes with specific presets that alter how the visualization is displayed. For example, the Spike visualization comes in two presets:

  • Spike
  • Amoeba

Both effects are part of the same visualization, but have different presets. A preset is a set of values for the attributes of a particular visualization.

Skin Attributes

If you create skins for Windows Media Player, you can display the standard visualizations in your skins using the Effects element. For more details on using visualizations in skins, see Windows Media Player Skins.

About Custom Visualizations