Torture-Testing Windows Media Player 10

[Jason Dunn]

I've completed my new PC-based PVR (article coming soon) and as part of that setup I have 12,305 audio files on the hard drive. Because this machine is running Windows Media Center Edition 2005, and because I'll be using it with an Xbox Extender, I needed to have Windows Media Player 10 catalog all those files in it's library. Historically, I've stored my music on my server, and used WMP10 to scan the files across the network. Because of that I've seen some very frustrating and bizarre behaviour, and was generally negative on WMP10's ability to handle a large number of files. Now that I'm running it locally, I have to say that I'm more impressed - it chewed through 12,305 files in 8 minutes and 18 seconds when I added them to the database. Not bad! I then clicked on the Tools menu item "Process Media Information Now" - I fully expected the program to crash and burn. Much to my surprise, and delight, it didn't. It began to update the Media Information on all my music.<br /><br />Media Information is Microsoft's term for metadata. Album, Artist, Track, all that jazz - all of the CDs that I've ripped in the past year have great metadata (thanks largely to WMP10), but tracks earlier than that are a bit of a mess. Several years back my wife and I spent an ungodly number of hours fixing the filename structure on all of our music - I had a mixture of different file naming from years of ripping CDs and acquiring legacy audio files ;-) But accurate file name does not make for complete metadata...<br /><br />When I started the process last night, it got to the 50% point fairly quickly, because it knows if a file has already been updated with Media Information. As of the time of this writing, it's at 83% and still going. I think that by tomorrow morning it will be complete. I'm somewhat leery of what it will do to the files, so I've kept a complete backup copy of all my music. I remain impressed, however, that WMP10 is able to cope with so many files and keep chugging away at updating my files. Nicely done Microsoft! :D

[Zack Mahdavi]

I'm looking forward to the article, Jason.

Wow, 12,000 songs is a lot of music! :)

[mcsouth]

I bit the bullet and upgraded to WMP10 earlier this week. So far, I'm reasonably pleased with it - it is behaving well, and it 'found' my music, organized it, and even built some playlists that I found 'interesting'. It certainly ripped through my music collection quickly, but then again, I don't have 12,000 music files! I'm not sure exactly how many there are (my PC is off right now, so I can't access the library from this laptop), but I have about 1.7GB of music that is encoded at 64kbps. It is nice to know that WMP10 will be able to handle my music collection as it continues to grow.

I too am looking forward to the article on this PC - this is the Athlon 64-based Shuttle, right?

[Jason Dunn]

I too am looking forward to the article on this PC - this is the Athlon 64-based Shuttle, right?

Yup, the SN95G. :D I have to finish my review of the DVX-POD first though....must...focus....

[Tim Williamson]

My dad and I bought an MP3 player for my mom for her birthday so I set her all up with WMP10 to rip and catalogue her CDs and so far it's working great. It was really easy for her to learn how to rip and "sync" her music with her MP3 player.

In addition, the other day she ripped a CD but wasn't connected to the internet so it named all her tracks "unknown". After she connected to the net she went to the music folder with the "unknown" tracks and they had automatically been renamed to the correct track by WMP10. Very cool!

Slightly off-topic: The only minor problem I've had is Firefox wasn't able to see the WMP10 plugin to play embedded videos and I ended up having to copy some dlls from another PC to get it to work. Here's (http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1169477#1169477) the link in case anyone has this same problem.

[Jason Dunn]

Slightly off-topic: The only minor problem I've had is Firefox wasn't able to see the WMP10 plugin to play embedded videos and I ended up having to copy some dlls from another PC to get it to work. Here's (http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1169477#1169477) the link in case anyone has this same problem.

Thanks - I've had the same problem forever and haven't found a way to solve it...I'll have to give this a try...

[RenesisX]

Microsoft actually test WMP by putting more than 300,000 tracks in the Media Library, so you should be OK in theory!

[Jason Dunn]

Microsoft actually test WMP by putting more than 300,000 tracks in the Media Library, so you should be OK in theory!

300K tracks? Wow. I can't imagine how bad the performance would be in that case - it's already quite slow when you go to the "View Albums" list for instance...

[RWC_Zippy]

I have a different gripe about WMP10... the Napster integration.
What gives? When you search for album info or go to 'view album info' (I can't remember which) it searches Napster by default.

Is there any way to change this? or get rid of the Napster icon in the top corner for that matter? I'd much rather use cddb.com to search for album info, but that's just me.

All in all, 10 WMP10 is definitely better than WMP9!!