Microsoft To Announce New Music Service This Week

[Kent Pribbernow]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/technology/personal_technology/9471751.htm' target='_blank'>http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/technology/personal_technology/9471751.htm</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Microsoft plans to quietly launch the MSN online music store with the new version of its Windows Media 10 player. Early-release versions of the player look like knock-offs of Apple's iTunes Music Store, complete with brushed nickel finish. But hey, why mess with success? A button in the upper right corner of the player will take consumers to the download store."</i><br /><br />We've been waiting for this fateful day to come since Microsoft first announced plans to enter the music download business. It will be interesting to see exactly how Microsoft implemented its Music store concept. So far I am decidedly unimpressed with Windows Media Player 10. It still has the same cobbled music library organization as its predecessors, which is more of a tree-like file manager interface using plus and minus signs to drill down into your library. The one feature I had hoped Microsoft would copy from iTunes is its music library and playlist manager. Looks like it will be a while longer before the brains in Redmond figure that one out. :roll:

[Tim Williamson]

Anyone else have a problem with WMP10 where when first opening a video file, you'll first hear audio then a few seconds later the video will come on?

[Filip Norrgard]

Anyone else have a problem with WMP10 where when first opening a video file, you'll first hear audio then a few seconds later the video will come on?Yup, me too. Sometimes the video does come but is very choppy in the first 3-5 seconds. A possible "workaround" is to open Windows Media before opening the video. ;)

[Felix Torres]

It still has the same cobbled music library organization as its predecessors, which is more of a tree-like file manager interface using plus and minus signs to drill down into your library.

Uh, don't expect the tree-view to go away any time soon.
If anything, it will get even more use in Longhorn Apps.

Tree-view is an old established Windows *feature*; every Windows user has seen it and used it since Win95.
It is a featured part of the Windows Explorer file Manager, the system hardware management applet in the Control Panel, and the remote administration tools of Windows Server.
It is also featured in dozens of apps from MS and others; WMP, as noted, Outlook, Outlook Express, Exchange, as well as MS's MSDN support website and dozens of third-party file managers for PCs and Pocket PCs (Palms, too). The Valen JPEGGER app recently featured here uses it to good effect in navigating large image file data structures.

So, I'll not debate subjective issues such as ease of use or intuitiveness, but I will say the tree-view does have one objective benefit; *familiarity*.
If you're a Windows user, you *know* how to navigate tree view.
Kinda like right-mouse clicking; it is always there and it always provides useful shortcuts.

What makes tree view in WMP particularly interesting is that instead of merely mapping the file system hierarchy, as it is most commonly used, it maps multiple *views* of the metadata database; thus, the branches where the collection is presented are pre-sorted by artist, album title, genre, etc, or unsorted. All dynamically.
And major changes can be made right in the tree-view and they automatically ripple through the whole data store, affecting hundreds of files in one fell swoop.
To some of us, this is convenient. ;-)

Longhorn will rely even more on system datastores and system-wide metadata views than even WMP so it is likely that tree-view will be even more prevalent as a means to quickly abstract, aggregate, and present data in a familar structure that users will know how to navigate and manipulate.

Me, I can't wait for WMP10 to get out of beta so I can start using it for "production" work; the three-pane view is something I've been hoping for for a while, actually. The way I use it, tree view is very handy in building big playlists quickly but, before, I couldn't see the playlist onscreen as it was built; I could see the last open album or the playlist, not both. And *that* was a hindrance.
With the three-pane view I can zip up and down the tree and one click selects the album, a sweep selects the songs, and a click or a drag adds them to the list.
No muss, no fuss, no changes from existing practice, just more data visible at once. Always a good thing, that.

WMP is what it is.
And what it is is a WINDOWS application that looks and acts like a Windows Application. It doesn't look or act like a Mac application, as iTunes on Windows does.

Windows has had media players since the days of Windows 3.0 (1990) and WMP has been steadily evolving since then.

Alternatives exist and everybody has their preferences, which is what alternatives exist for.
Some folks swear by Winamp, others prefer MusicMatch.
I suppose *somebody* out there even likes Real Player, though I've never personally met any, so I can't swear such people exist. ;-)
But some of us do like WMP; not as a free substitute for another app, but in its own right.
As far as MS-supplied applets and utilities go, WMP is one of the better ones.
It does what it is supposed to do cleanly and without much fuss. I've never had any real problem using it to feed multiple media players of different types or using the same media player on multiple computers.
It just works.

You milleage will differ, of course... ;-)

[Mojo Jojo]

Uh, don't expect the tree-view to go away any time soon.If anything, it will get even more use in Longhorn Apps.

And the .Net framework as well...

Back to WM10 in general, I am baised against it to begin with but I can tell you they really haven't done anything to win me over.

While it's navigation is just another method of getting a job done, that issue isn't the main reason I dislike it. To me I think there is something else at the core that keeps me from liking it.

Windows XP in general feels sluggish. Applications like Word and Excel have literal pauses when doing simple things like cut and paste. WMP chews up a lot of resources to run. So on and so forth.

Yes, on a top of the line models PCs this is reduced somewhat but on a number of older machines (6 months, which isn't old or at least shouldn't be) I see this issue.

My hope is that Longhorn fixes this but seeing the minimum requirements doesn't add hope.

Now this may seem like a tangent, but really the response time and how the windows interface behaves is what keeps me from using it more then anything else.

(shrugs) Some two cents. Mileage may vary, yada yada yada... :)

[phillypocket]

Thanks Felix, for posting something people seem to forget. Many people like and expect windows application to act like widows applications. Now I'll freely admit I don't use a mac, and no-one I know uses a mac (at least not any more :wink: ), but nothing I've seen (notice, that i've seen... That doesn't mean there is nothing.) either in their interface or in their industrial design makes me want to. I don't use quicktime, or itunes because apple didn't have the decency to respect my choice of interface and how I work with my computer. I seem to reacall some apple users in a huff a few years ago when microsoft released a version of office that did not follow apple interface conventions, and rightly so (their huff was right, not microsoft's interface decision). Microsoft, however, heard them and, afaik, adopted the necessary interface conventions (feel free to correct that point if they didn't). Apple however doesn't seem to care. What's good for general bullmoose is good for the usa. (and don't get me started about adobe and macromedia, although macromedia may be coming around slightly)
Point is, I'm also one of those people, that not only finds the tree view familiar, but also usefull, efficient, and preferable to other navigations methods for now. Will that change over time? Maybe. But for now (and from what I've seen, for 10) it works well.

P.S. Does anyone else have to edit and preview a post several time to make sure you typed what you thought you typed? :oops: or is it just me?

[Felix Torres]

I seem to reacall some apple users in a huff a few years ago when microsoft released a version of office that did not follow apple interface conventions, and rightly so (their huff was right, not microsoft's interface decision). Microsoft, however, heard them and, afaik, adopted the necessary interface conventions (feel free to correct that point if they didn't).

No need to correct.
Your recall is accurate.
In fact MS OFiice was the first OS/X app to fully implement and take advantage of the new GUI on the Mac-side.
Recent versions of Office for the Mac are designed as native Mac Apps instead of as ports of the Windows version.

This native app behavior thing was a bigger issue back in the days of Win3.1 and was one of the reasons Word beat out Word Perfect; Word was a full Windows App while the first version of Word Perfect for Windows (like the Atari ST and Amiga Versions, but unlike the MAC version of the time) was just the DOS app with pull-down menus.
Oddly enough, the best version was the one they wrote for NextStep.
And to add insult to injury, none of the advanced features of the NeXT version ever found their way to another platform.
Talk about reading the tea leaves wrong, huh?

In computing environments, its usually best to follow the old dictum for travellers:
"When in Rome, do as the Romans do..." ;-)