Well.....

For years, if I ever wanted to "split out" a part of a music video, I would take it into a video editor, and create a new video file ( whatever - .mp4, .avi - doesn't matter, any format Windows Media Player understands )

I've ALWAYS wondered if there was a "better way" - well - today I found it.

You create, using Notepad or any other plain text editor, a .asx file - here's a sample .asx file - 

<Asx Version = "3.0">
  <Entry>
    <StartTime value = "00:00:23.000" />
    <Duration value = "00:00:30.000" />
   <Ref href = "some-video.mp4"/>
  </Entry>
</Asx>

Just save it in the same directory as the video ( "some-video.mp4"  here ), and double click on the saved .asx file - Windows Media Player will start up, and will play the video file "some-video.mp4" starting at 23 seconds into the video, and will stop after a further 30 seconds......

Holey schmoley - how come I was unaware of this....  REAL useful for play-alongs on isolated bits you want to practice.

Although - the "manual editing" method does have its benefits - you can obviously repeat the same part over and over with a short gap between each repeat and so on - but then again I guess you can set up WMP to have a looped play-list to repeatedly repeat the .asx file - or whatever...

Anyway - I was just amazed to have found this...  I had been convinced that there "was no easy way" - hope it's useful to someone else