The Media Centre HTPC's Music library immediately lists your most recently heard tracks, or allows you to browse your music library. You can search by title, genre and artist and then press ‘play’ to set your music playing immediately. With built-in support for a wide variety of formats along with 5.1 & 7.1 surround-sound, you will get a superior playback experience, and you can even enjoy how your music looks thanks to the visualisation effects – particularly if you’ve got your Media Center Edition hooked up to your main television set.

Whats more it plays it using play lists, genre, artist, etc. You can search for songs, download or stream directly off the net, it automatically shows CD covers for artists... and all at the touch of a remote control!

However, the advanced features of a Media Centre HTPC go much deeper. From the moment you start using it, it monitors what you’re listening to and how often you do it, generating automatic playlists that enable you to instantly pick a list of tracks tailored to your taste. If you’d prefer to create your own list of greatest hits, you can so with ease by using Media Player in Windows. Don’t feel you’ve got to confine your creations to your hard drive, either. Another few taps on the remote control enables you to burn your playlist to CD or DVD, and if you’ve got an MP3 player then you can plug it in and add music to it with ease.