Before we leap into the chapter, let’s look briefly at the multimedia control that ships with Visual Basic 5 as one of the custom controls. I must confess that in the last two releases of Visual Basic, I’ve tended to ignore the control and go with using the media control interface (MCI) directly, especially because the MCI is so easy to use. Visual Basic 5 looks more functional than its predecessors, but it still has a few limitations. If you require only simple multimedia tasks, you might find that the control is adequate, but for more control over multimedia files you’ll still need to resort to the MCI. In this chapter, we’ll be looking at how to use the MCI rather than how to use the MCI control.