Initial Thoughts on WMP 10

[Jason Dunn]

I'm just playing with WMP10, and so far I like it - they don't seem to have changed that much from the technical beta, but it looks more polished. They've given it a new skin - the library is now easier to read. I can't seem to find a way to remove some of the presets for sorting - I only care about sorting by artist, not "Contributing Artist" and "Composer". I think in terms of two parameters - ALBUM and ARTIST. I don't need to be confused by showing other sort options. It still starts up showing nothing but an empty blue window - why not start up showing the Library? Or the Guide? I still see too many scrollbars as well for song information that can't fit in the window. There's a Purchased Music filter, which works well with Napster, although I wish there was a way to filter that data.<br /><br />Things with Napster are finally working for me as well - I ran into a problem where I tried to download an update and the installer got locked in a cycle where, every time I loaded WMP, it would try to install, but the install would never continue because it would complain about WMP running (it wasn't - I even killed it in the task manager). At any rate, this new version of WMP allowed me to finally fix the problem. I was able to sign up for Napster's subscription service, and at the moment I'm groovin' to Jimi Hendrix playing live at the Isle of Wight.<br /><br />The library still doesn't work the way I want it to - the logic is hard-wired into thinking that everyone has all of their music, photos, and videos located on the local hard drive and nowhere else. I want to be able to right-click on PICTURES, MUSIC, TV, and VIDEO, and tell it exactly where the folders are that it should monitor, and the parameters around that monitoring. I know you can set up folder monitoring under a different interface, but it's clumsy. Let's hope folder monitoring actually works this time, unlike the beta or version 9.

[Jason Dunn]

The "Unknown Errors" are still there - doh! It's silly to give errors that are unknown, it certainly doesn't help the users...

[James Fee]

Freaking XP downloaded and installed WMP 10 automatically. I thought the auto update was only for "critical updates"?@!*# :x

[Tim Williamson]

Is there an easy way to uninstall WMP10 and go back to WMP9? I see no real advantage to WMP10, in addition, movies have a lag time before they start up, why couldn't MS fix this very apparent bug that's been in there since the technical beta? :roll:

[Jason Dunn]

Freaking XP downloaded and installed WMP 10 automatically. I thought the auto update was only for "critical updates"?@!*# :x

Wow, that IS strange - I wouldn't consider WMP10 a "Critical Update"....!?

[James Fee]

Wow, that IS strange - I wouldn't consider WMP10 a "Critical Update"....!?Tell me about it. I clicked on a WMV feed this morning and boom, there was WMP 10. I didn't install it myself.

[Jason Dunn]

Is there an easy way to uninstall WMP10 and go back to WMP9?

System Restore - it sets a system restore point when it installs, so you should be able to roll back.

[Mojo Jojo]

...until the next morning when auto update gets launched and sees you don't have 10 installed yet. =)

I think it is rather poor to have to change your update settings to avoid getting these types of things auto pushed.

[James Fee]

I have not gotten it at work yet, but our company is blocking the XP SP2 updates, so maybe that is the reason.

[brianchris]

I upgraded to WMP10 just now. So far so good, but I must admit I'm not as hard core digital media enthusiast as most here.

Two questions I have so far.....I hooked WMP10 up to my napster account (via plugiing), and it appears that there are now 30 second previews of all my purchased Napster tracks on the computer I just installed WMP10 on.....why is that? Anyway to get rid of that?

Volume in WMP10 is VERY low.....seems like I have to blast out my system to hear good, and then messenger boings and I jump out of my seat......any solutions, or am I doing something wrong?

[Jason Dunn]

...it appears that there are now 30 second previews of all my purchased Napster tracks on the computer I just installed WMP10 on.....why is that? Anyway to get rid of that?

I'm just getting started with Napster, so I'm not an expert yet, but I haven't seen that on my computer.

Volume in WMP10 is VERY low.....seems like I have to blast out my system to hear good, and then messenger boings and I jump out of my seat......any solutions, or am I doing something wrong?

This is definitely not normal - I haven't noticed any change in volume level. You've got the WMP volume and the system volume turned up?

[Schade]

Anyone else notice that they took away the "All Picture" tab? I played around with it in the beta, I couldn't figure out how to view the picture itself. It had a long way to go to be worthwhile. I was hoping they would pull it off and have it ready to go for the actual release because it would be nice to have a single place to synchronise all media to say, a Pocket PC.

WMP 10 is the first media player of any sort I ever really played with. I'm trying to figure out how to tag my MP3. I see a "Genre" and "Style" tag. I can't edit "Style" in the advanced tag editor or in the library window, but when WMP auto downloads album info, it fills in a Style. Is this because Style isn't part of ID3v2? Where is the style info kept then? In another WMP database somewhere? What if I want to transfer that MP3 to another computer?

(I'm new to this stuff and between trying to figure out how to organize MP3 and jpegs on my hard drive for use with WMP and Picasa, respectively, is going to make my head explode. What info is in the file and what is in the db? And how do I store it all on a network and make mutiple clients play together nicely? These are all rhetorical questions, BTW.)

[Jason Dunn]

Anyone else notice that they took away the "All Picture" tab? I played around with it in the beta, I couldn't figure out how to view the picture itself. It had a long way to go to be worthwhile. I was hoping they would pull it off and have it ready to go for the actual release because it would be nice to have a single place to synchronise all media to say, a Pocket PC.

It's still there - right below All Video and right above Other Media. You can view the picture by clicking MORE INFO above. Not very intuitive - it should come up automatically.

I see a "Genre" and "Style" tag. I can't edit "Style" in the advanced tag editor or in the library window, but when WMP auto downloads album info, it fills in a Style. Is this because Style isn't part of ID3v2?

I don't see Style anywhere - I see Genre on the main interface, and in the advanced tag editor I see Mood. But no style anywhere.

Are you sure we're using the same player? :lol:

[Schade]

It's still there - right below All Video and right above Other Media. You can view the picture by clicking MORE INFO above. Not very intuitive - it should come up automatically.

Thanks for the More Info tip, I didn't catch that. As for the All Pictures, I'm thoroughly confused. Here's what I did. Download WMP10. Install on a desktop. Play around. Notice no All Pictures. Post to DMT Forum.

Copy install package to laptop. Install (right over WMP10 Tech Beta just like on the desktop.) Read your reply about All Pictures. Look at laptop, see it. Worry that I'm losing my mind. Check desktop. It's not there.

So, I don't know what the difference is, but it's not on my desktop. I'll poke around and see if I have an option set incorrectly somewhere that disables it. I'd like to use it to handle syncing pics to my PocketPC.

After a quick investigation I see that my laptop installation has associated the dvr-ms filetype, but my desktop didn't. Must be a hardware thing, as in, missing hardware on the desktop.


I don't see Style anywhere - I see Genre on the main interface, and in the advanced tag editor I see Mood. But no style anywhere.

Are you sure we're using the same player? :lol:

I think we're using the same player!

It's actually hidden. If you go to Choose Columns in the View menu, you can enable it. But you can't edit it. The only way I can get anything in the field is if I do "Update Album Info". I like "Update Album Info" because it downloads cover art for the folder thumbnail and adds genre info. It appears to copy whatever is in the Genre tag into the Style tag. I wanted to use Style for classifying, but I guess it won't fly.

And speaking of which, I'm confused by the Update Album Info functionality. For some albums I can click Find Album Info and it will find it, display the album cover, and genre, etc. BUT IT WON'T UPDATE MY MEDIA LIBRARY! Others it works fine.

One last thing to note. Even though I have the option 'Only Add Missing Information' selected, when I 'Update Album Info' it overwrites everything. This is where my problem with genre arises.

I guess from now on I'll force WMP10 to do what I want by doing this.

Download album from eMusic
Update Album Info to get cover art
Manually edit Genre to be more descriptive since Style isn't editable
NEVER Update Album Info again, ever, ever

Or maybe I'll use a different tagging tool and turn off auto-update.

Other than that, I'm really liking WMP10!

[Schade]

Uh-oh.

I found a way to force a dowload of the album cover and genre info. If you select the album in the Album Artist filter, right click, and choose Find Album Info, it will search beta.music.msn.com for a match. (It looks like SONG ALBUM ARTIST.) BUT, it does it on a per-track basis. You have to click on the album match results for every single track for the stuff to be updated in the media library.

Has anybody found a way to update an entire album's worth of info in one fell swoop?

(I think the problem lies with me. Shame on me for thinking in terms of full albums in these days of 99 cent track downloads!)

[Jason Dunn]

It's actually hidden. If you go to Choose Columns in the View menu, you can enable it. But you can't edit it. The only way I can get anything in the field is if I do "Update Album Info". I like "Update Album Info" because it downloads cover art for the folder thumbnail and adds genre info. It appears to copy whatever is in the Genre tag into the Style tag. I wanted to use Style for classifying, but I guess it won't fly.

Ok, that's what I thought. The thing is though, if it's hidden by default, and you can't edit it...what are you using it for? ;-) It must be in there for some reason, but I'd just use Genre if I were you and don't waste time with something you can't change. :wink:

[Jason Dunn]

Has anybody found a way to update an entire album's worth of info in one fell swoop?

Nope. Sometimes I'll see it do it, but more often than not you need to match up every single track in the album, one by one. It sucks. I think, perhaps, the only time it does the full album all at once is when there's only ONCE instance of the album in the database, which is very rare.

[KC]

Concerning the All Pictures, in Options under the Player tab there's a box called "Enable picture support for devices". This turns on All Pictures in the Library. Mine was originally off.

Is the only use for pictures in WMP to sync to a moblie device? Does WMP change the picture file in any way such as adding tags? I'm not sure if I want a bunch of stars added to all my pictures.

[Schade]

As far as the Style tag is concerned, I'm not really using it. I'm just finally deciding to move to an MP3 player and encode over 1000 CDs. I wanted dual level classification system. 5-10 genres with 10-20 styles in each genre for auto playlist creation. When I head back to the man-cave to grab a handful of discs for the evening, the tend to be similar items. I would love to do auto playlists as long as I could insure that I got a few hours of one specific type of music for the evening. Maybe it's just me. The other obvious choice is to simply make 80-100 very specific Genres, but I'd really like 2 levels.

I'm going to evaluate a few other packages, but I really started to dig into media players around the time WMP10 Tech Beta was released. I figured that since I basically pay for the software when I upgrade the Windows OS, I give WMP a shot until I found something that it didn't do very well.

Anyway, I don't want to throw this off topic, so I'll just that so far I really like WMP10 for playback (and manipulation of the library for playback), it seems intuitive to me. I like being able to see the library and the now playing list all at once. And I'm really excited about the possibilities to use it to automate syncing with portable devices or (hopefully for Christmas?!) a few distributed media devices around the house.

My choice of MP3 player might even involve whether it's compatible with WMP10. As long as other the other requirements are met, that is.

[ale_ers]

Question: Is WMP 10 compatable with pocket pc's?

I remember that the beta was not...so I didn't download it.

I'm one of the few people (as far as I know) that have not had any trouble transfering puchased songs to the SD card of my ipaq. And I don't really want to mess with that right now.

[Schade]

Question: Is WMP 10 compatable with pocket pc's?


Yeah, but it doesn't seem very useful. I was hoping I could have it convert picture to 320x240 before the sync and videos to the 320x240 and a lower bitrate, but I can't figure out how to do that.

It will re-encode mp3 to a lower bitrate and copy over to the device, but it's not a true sync. (If you remove the song from the sync list, it won't remove it from the device on the next sync.)

I don't know how it handles DRM, as everything I download comes from eMusic DRM-free. (It also comes in VBR, so I like the automation provided by WMP to re-encode a song and copy it to my PPC, while maintaining the h-res version on the computer.)

[Philip Colmer]

A word of warning to anyone in the UK who has been using WMP 9 in conjunction with the two online stores that it supports ... don't upgrade to WMP 10 - it doesn't have those two stores any more.

In fact, WMP 10 doesn't have ANY UK stores :evil:

I'm about to find out how good the system restore is - I want those stores back.

--Philip

[David Prahl]

Well I've had plenty of problems with video files in WM10. I was part of the beta program (a bad idea), and really haven't seen much difference between the beta and final release as far as stability.

I'll open a video file (can't find a correlation between file extension and issue) and this will happen:
--Audio starts, but no video or progress bar.
--Right clicking on the taskbar starts video and progress bar, but I can't close the program.
--Only way to shut it down is to go into the Task Manager and shut down the actual process. 8O

I am updated and completly legal - anyone have any fixes?

[gibb193a]

I don't know how it handles DRM, as everything I download comes from eMusic DRM-free. (It also comes in VBR, so I like the automation provided by WMP to re-encode a song and copy it to my PPC, while maintaining the h-res version on the computer.)

I was excited by this feature but found out that it does not re-encode WMAs with DRM to a different bitrate when copying to my iRiver. It did it for WMAs I ripped from my CDs without copy-protection, though. I guess changing the bitrate would mean changing the license? I was quite disappointed with that.