Blair Space: Windows Media Player 10

This article was published on Blair Space at:
http://tech.blairspace.com/reviews/2.html

Windows Media Player 10

Though I am still in avoidance mode with Windows XP Service Pack two, I finally gave into upgrading my Windows Media Player 7 to the new version 10. What ever happened to 8? The next leap of course was 9 Series which had such a cool name. Although I questioned how intergrated it was with Windows. Not that I installed it.

Anyway, when I first heard about Windows Media Player 10 I spent a long time reading up on it on Microsoft.com. As a range remarked, strange considering it is a free product but I like to be in the know ;). Although that said it was all promotional text. Finally a month or two later I decided to try it out though. It installed itself fine overriding my existing media player which I shall be sad to see go. It’s been with me going on two years now.

Although I never actually used it for music, that was a job best filled by the sleek, small and fast loading Ultra Player. It was when you wanted to get into the heavy stuff you brought out Windows Media Player. Which along with a few other video playing applications tended to crash my computer a lot. Still that is due to a driver problem, not down to the software.

Once it loaded up, I went and yet again unticked the box to make Windows Media Player the default for Playing DVD’s (I am a Power DVD fan myself) and after removing the crap from my library I decided to add the rest of my music. I have some stuff in the My Music folder which was already in my library although the bulk of my music is elsewhere and it is not something I had ever previously added to my WMP library.

One thing I was hoping for is that it wouldn’t add every song I played into my library. I much prefer to only have my complete albums that I have nice and sorted out in there. However I suspect it will as previous versions have.

Another thing I noticed when launching up was the appearance of the MSN Music UK store which I was tempted to buy a track from although they didn’t have it in – question though, how much is a spot like that worth. Napster have a prime position whereas nobody else seems to, suspicious?

Anyway so on with my experiences – the main beef I had with the last one is that if you accidentally double clicked a song (especially while building a play list) it would delete the entire play list and play that one song. On hearing one of the developers on Web Talk Radio he said they had solved this. Well they have, I couldn’t find the previous button but Control + B restored my original play list, although it did start the track it was in the middle of from the beginning.

I did like the ability to choose what happens when you double click on a library item however. My personal preference was to have the item added to the play list on a double click, after all that is the only real reason I can see myself using WMP, if I am using a long play list.

I have to say this worked out quite well – normally I have to browse through all my files and find an artist that I am interested in. But with the media library I can simply scroll down the list of artists and click on the one’s that interest me, double clicking my favourite songs to have it added to the play list. The only problem I found here is when the artists are spelt wrong or differently as haunts many media players including Kazaa.

WMP provides a function to edit it without opening up any prompt boxes which is just a right and left click away but most importantly you can change the artist of many songs at once by highlighting them all. So if half your songs are spelt AFI and the other half are spelt A.F.I. it is easy enough to change. If anything, this installation helped me to clean up a lot of the incorrect metadata.

The ability to pick the columns that are displayed is a welcome customisation tool to any application although as usual I cannot get rid of enough to make it all fit without scrolling. One error I did notice though is that my mouse seems to start selecting boxes a little too easily as if it is permanently clicked.

The rating system based on five stars is also quite a good feature although so far I don’t actually know what it does. According to the help files it is for auto generated play lists although I can’t see it being as good as Launch Cast. The play list only displays song titles not artists which is a bit of a downer although you can find out the artist by hovering over the track along with plenty of other details in a nice little tool tip.

Whereas in Windows Media 6 and 7 the supposed hidden menu bar would appear every time you went near it – not so with WMP 10. You can access all the menus from a drop down right-click style menu so the proper menu bar only appears when you really need it – it is all customisable anyway.

To whip through the other features – the new icon looks pretty cool when it is nice and big although does not shrink down too well. The look is defiantly improved, the blue isn’t perfect for the covering but the look of the content is great, and the skins are the same as the previous versions so I am guessing possible backyard compatibility for any existing skins you have installed.

So has WMP 10 won me over? Well it is early to say what with my use of it being a few hours but so far, no. I have always preferred applications that load fast, Firefox over Mozilla, EmEditor over Dreamweaver and currently Ultraplayer over Windows Media Player. That’s not to say that Windows Media Player isn’t a good product though it is about the most functional on the market. It almost has me won over, but not quite yet.