mallen

I'm trying to creat this effect. The best example I could find is the Windows Media player. Notice the beveled areas. They are not square with sharp corners or rectangular in shape. They are wavy. How is this done?

RackToon

Well, I'm not sure how Windows did it, but there is no shape you can't create in PhotoShop simply by using the pen tool. I kinda (sloppily) traced your image with the pen tool, saved it as a selection and filled it with a gradient. Anothe option would ve to create it in a vector program like Illustrator and import it into Photoshop for editing.

mallen

See next to the word "seek" there is a middle beveled line there. How is that done? Here are some more examples.
http://aroots.com/ *See the Mp3 player
http://www.craftgrafix.com/awakening/index.html
http://www.vrtour.it/v1/en/
http://www.xbox.com/en-us/news/default.htm *See right above the word "Xbox live"

Bacardi

When you click on the gradient in the toolbar of the gradient tool, the Gradient editor dialog opens.
You can add colour stops when you click below the gradient, and by double clicking on them, you can set any colour you like. Then you drag them to the shape you want, and click ok (you may want to save the gradient).
Next you select a linear gradeint and drag vertically from bottom to top (in this example that is) to get this effect. With a little tweaking you can create nearly any shape you want.

As the gradient reacts to your fore-and background colours, you can set these, or tweak afterwards (when in RGB) with the ColorBalance tool.
Or paint on a new layer set to Color blend more. etc etc...

BTW: I applied a light Gaussian Blure (Filters>Blur>GB) to smoothen a bit.

The second example was done with the same gradient inside a circular selection, then inverting the selection (Selection>Invert or Ctrl/Shift+I) and applying the gradient from the center beyond the range of the first circle. Also a bit of GaussianBlurring.