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Old January 17th, 2009, 09:10 PM
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Smiley14 Smiley14 is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: MN, USA
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Ok, here are the steps to import a song into WMM and then re-save to your computer at a smaller size:

Open up Movie Maker
On left, you'll see the "Task" options:
1. Capture Video
2. Edit Movie
3. Finish Movie

Click on the arrow after Capture Video to expand your option under that section. You'll see:
Capture From Video Device
Import Video
Import Pictures
Import Audio or Music

In this case, double-click on Import Audio or Music.
Another Window will open. In this window, find where your song is saved on your computer. Select the song and click on Import.

The song will appear as a thumbnail on the middle section of Movie Maker, known as "Collections."

Along the bottom of Movie Maker, you can see three horizontal bars. This is your timeline. You can see the top bar of the timeline is for videos, the middle bar is for Audio/Music, and the third is for Titles. You want to drag your song down to the Audio/Music section of your timeline. Put your mouse on the thumbnail of your song and drag it by right clicking on your mouse and moving or dragging the song down to the Audio section of the timeline.

To save, we want to "Finsih Movie." Go back to the options or tasks on the left hand side. Click on the arrow after Finish Movie to expand your options under that section. You'll see an option to Save to my Computer.
Double click on Save to my computer. Another window will open up. Name the song and choose where you want to save to your computer and hit next. It will then say:
Best quality for playback or
see other choices.
Double click on See Other Choices. You'll see:
Best Quality for playback
Best Fit to File Size
Other Settings

Select Best Fit to File Size and choose whatever size you want to save the song as and click next. It will then save to your computer. You can close down Movie Maker and find the song wherever you saved it on your computer. It will be saved as a WMV file. This can be uploaded to a share site or emailed.

My laptop has Vista on it and a different version of WMM. This is the steps for XP. If you do have Vista, let me know as it's slightly different. I have my old latop that has XP on it still as well, but the sound doesn't work on it so I also recorded the steps for you, but it has no sound unfortunately. But it might still help you? I uploaded it here for you. It's only 600kb, so should be fine for you to download on dial-up. To download from this site, you will see a little box at the top where it wants you to enter a three letter code. Enter the three letters and click on download. It will show you two download options in two columns. Ignore the first column, it's for premium users. The second column will have a count down on it for 45 seconds. After it counts down, a download button will appear. Click on the "free download" button and choose to save to your computer. If you're able to re-size the song, you can then upload it to this same site to share it with Rainbow.

These are probably too big for you to download, but here is the portion of an old tutorial I made a few years ago for a friend. I edited it down to just the section where I talk about importing, but it's still 12MB, so not sure if you can download that or not. And if you're really feeling crazy, LOL, here is my full 37 minute tutorial. It's 100MB though, so pretty big! I made it a few years ago for a friend, so I'm talking to her and she already knew some of the basics, so I'm moving pretty fast. Not sure if it would make such sense to someone unless they knew the bare bones basics of WMM. And in this case, we were working with TV episodes instead of home movies. But it's all the same idea. I wish I could remake one, but my old laptop has no sound and my current one has Vista, so a different version than XP's. But hopefully this will help!
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Last edited by Smiley14; January 17th, 2009 at 10:11 PM.
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