I've recently setup a Windows 7 machine for our living room media center, and was excited about the aspect of listening to some audio podcasts while preparing dinner, or while reading the paper. I quickly found out, however, that listening to podcasts via the Music feature of Media Center is not very usable. When I play a podcast, I can pause, play, or fast forward. But there's no rewind? That seems quite ridiculous to me. I've looked at this on several W7 machines, and all are the same. No rewind of music/audio files.

 What would REALLY be nice is if I could FF and Rewind, AND skip forward and skip backward, like I am able to do for DVD/Video playback... seems like that would be logical and consistant, no?

 If anyone has a way to enable rewinding a music/audio/podcast file, I would love to know about it. Even better would be a way to enable the same FF/Rew/SkipF/SkipB functionality for music/audio/podcasts that I have for video/DVD. I would even settle for the slider timeline bar to show up so I can use my mouse functionality on my remote control to point and click at a point on the time bar that is several minutes ago.

You can open up Media Player (switch to now playing tab) whilst listening to music/podcasts and use the scrb bar on that to skip/rewind etc...

Media Center uses Media Player for music playback.

I use it for podcasts and it works ok - other than the need to use a mouse (or gyration remote etc).

Opening up media player is a handy tip. Thanks for that. It will help on the laptop when on the treadmill... doesn't help much for the entertainment center in the living room, though. Such a basic, functional expectancy, I would think, for it to be in media center.

What file format are your podcasts in?

Most of the podcasts I listen to are .mp3's... some are .wma, though. Both have the problem.

The only reason I asked which file formats they are in is because I thought I could rewind my wma's but tried it last night and couldn't!!  WTF!!!  Is Media Center the only player which you cant rewind music files or are there others??????

Rich

My new technique for mp3 podcasts is to change the file ext to .mpg and then play them via the video library!

Still no ffwd and rewind, but skip back / forward works ok - as does the enter a number and press play feature.

CRAZY!

Absolutely brilliant thinking!

I confirmed that this works for both .mp3's and .wma's... I changed my .mp3 podcasts to .mpg, and my .wma podcasts to .wmv. Both now show up in the "videos" menu of WMC, and both will play and allow use of the skip forward/backward buttons.

I sucks that we have to have this as a work around, but I'll take vs. not having a decent way to listen to my podcasts.