In AV Mix Master you have two players and they look like this:
Click any part of the player to jump to its associated topic
The top left corner contains the name of the artist and the song of the currently playing track
The right top corner contains a countdown time indication of the track duration. At 15 seconds before the end of the track, this timer will turn red, indicating that the player is about to fade out and start the other player.
The rating is shown in a number of stars, varying from 1 (you don't ever want to listen to this song again) to 5 (your absolute favorite songs). The color of the stars can be either gold or blue. Blue means that the track was automatically rated by AV Mix Master (if you play a song a few times, it gets 4 blue stars, if you play it a lot it will get 5 blue stars). You can simply click at a star to give the current track that rating. Right-clicking the rating allows you to remove the user rating, in effect giving it the blue automatic rating.
The Media Information box shows extra information about the currently playing track. It contains:
The rotating CD symbol in the right bottom corner of the Media Information pane indicates that this player is playing. Most of the time only one player is playing, however during fade-over or mixing operations, both players may have the rotating CD icon.
The bottom part contain the player controls. The first black line rotates information about the track and shows the time frame of the current track (in this case, the track has ran for 4 seconds)
The position bar allows you to move the current position in a track. Simply drag the handle to any position and release it. Playback will restart at that position. NOTE: the cue time will be changed to the location where you position the handle.
The pause or play button (in this case the button shows the pause symbol, because this player is already playing) allows you to pause or play this specific player. You should not use this button (instead use the green pause/play button in between the players), unless you want to specifically mix or start the inactive player.
The Stop button allows you to stop the player. The same applies for this button as for the Pause/Play buttons. Do not use them unless necessary.
The Eject button is used to remove the current track from this player and fill it with the top item from the playlist. You can use this button to remove unwanted tracks and fill the player with a new track.
The mute button will turn the volume to 0. You can also use the volume slider to specifically set the volume of one of the players. However, AV Mix Master will also automatically change the volume of a player during fading operations. If you want to change the overall volume (master volume) you should change the Windows Volume Control or change your speaker settings or Amplifier settings.
This button allows you to change the playmode of the players. In normal conditions the players are set to "Continue" in which case the next player starts after the current player is about to finish. Clicking this button will change it to "Single" mode, in which case the player will stop after it has played its track (a message is shown that playback has stopped). In order to play the next track, you simply need to click the green pause/play button. This function is great if you want to stop your playlist to play from a real CD deck for example. Note that Single mode will revert to Continue after it was used.
Clicking the Continue/Single button a second time will bring both players in "Always Single" mode, in which case both players will stop every time they have played a track. Clicking the button for a third time will put the player(s) in Continue mode again.
The time frame (in this case it shows 0:00:03) indicates the beginning of the track's playback time (also known as cue time). AV Mix Master will start the track at that time when playing is imminent (you can change the cue time in the settings dialog). If you click this timeframe it will change the cue time for this track to the position of the position bar. If a user had clicked in this example, the time here would show as 0:04:12 for example). If the played is cued (the red Cue button was pressed), the player would revert the position to this cue time.
The small sample button allows you quickly cue to the cue time and restart playback. This is used to loop a part of the song and is used in conjunction with the cue time left of the button)
If you right-click a player (not its controls), the context menu will show allowing you to do the following:
Allows you to change the properties of the current track (like artist, title, genre, rating, etc.)
Add the currently playing track to a playlist. The playlist window will show, allowing you to select a playlist to which to add this track or to make a new playlist.
Same as the eject button.
Move the currently loaded item back to the top of the playlist and fill the player with the previous top of the playlist. In effect swapping tracks.
This will activate the current player, set its volume to full and start playback
This will start a search for the current track's artist, title or album. Same as clicking the properties in the Media Information pane.
This will toggle the visualizations pane; the Media Information pane will be removed to allow a visualization to be shown. NOTE: The visualization that is shown is the same that is selected in Windows Media Player. In order to change the visualization, you will need to change this in Windows Media Player. A restart of AV Mix Master is required to show the new visualization.
NOTE: Visualizations can take a huge impact on system performance and you should be careful in selecting them. AV Mix Master can sometimes lose the ability to fade over with some visualizations in use.