Chris Lanier Says "Fix WMP or Trash It!"

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://msmvps.com/chrisl/archive/2005/04/02/40650.aspx' target='_blank'>http://msmvps.com/chrisl/archive/2005/04/02/40650.aspx</a><br /><br /></div><i>"It is becoming incredibly pathetic how Microsoft just doesn’t seem to care at all about some of their products. Not only was Windows Media Player 10 a huge disappointment for WMP users, MCE users are feeling it now. There are over 100+ bugs in Windows Media Player 10. Over 100 bugs people, 100. Why in the world was a product released as final with that many bugs? Microsoft just doesn’t care or something? Seems like that to me and countless others. Microsoft’s Windows Media Player Newsgroup is crap because of a few issues. The first being they refuse to address a single issue. The second being, they refused to take any sort of feedback from their users and MVP’s when WMP 10 was in beta. The features they market as the big ones for WMP are completely and total failures. You can’t sync to “supported” portable devices correctly, the Media Library is nothing but near 50 reported bugs, never fixed. You can’t reliably play purchased tracks with protection without getting errors that Microsoft refused to address. Oh, a huge percent of the posts in the Newsgroup are the same questions over and over again. One would think Microsoft would see this was better their documentation, but no, they don’t care."</i><br /><br />Chris Lainer has an axe to grind with WMP, and I can't say that I completely disagree with him. I use WMP daily, and all in all I think it's one of the better music players out there, but there are certainly some things about it that I'd like to see improved. Most of my complaints are around the library though. If you use WMP, what are your wishes for how it can be improved?

[sojourner753]

Unfortunately this is what you get with Microsoft. Don't misunderstand, I'm not bashing them or anything.
Microsoft has made it their strategy to promote their platforms by producing products that are "good enough" for 80% of their target users. This is why they are almost always eye candy, yet don't hold up when encountered by power users. Windows Media player is "good enough" to promote Microsofts media platform.

As a free software, there is little incentive to provide constant updates and innovations. Most people use it to play media files they downloaded from the net or got from their friends.

This is apparent in other products like ActiveSync. Sure there are problems, and obvious features missed, but its free and "good enough" to enable and promote their Windows Mobile Platform.

This becomes all the more painful when there is no viable competive product. Which is probably the case for WMP and definitely the case for ActiveSync.

[mcsouth]

I suppose that I probably fall into that 80% where WMP is "good enough"..... :(

I guess the things that bug me the most are related to the Media Library, although they aren't as severe as listed in the blog. I have noticed that when you rip a CD, WMP doesn't really give you any options about how to "bin" the album - This primarily relates to "Original Soundtrack" CD's from movies, opera, etc. I ended up with several "Original Soundtrack" categories, all varying by one letter or so, and had quite a time trying to figure out how to move all of those albums into one category. I finally got it done, but not without a lot of hassle.

I've noticed that album art seems to be really spotty - to the point where it sometimes displays it for one song, then drops it for the next, then displays it for the song after that - even though all songs were ripped from the same album at the same time!

Last is mainly a feature thing....I was planning on reripping all of my CD's to a much higher bitrate (WMA Lossless or similar), since I had originally ripped to 64 kbps in order to shoehorn as many songs onto a small player. I moved all of the songs that I still had on this player (256MB) to a new folder called "Mobile Music" using Windows Explorer, and then started ripping some CD's. After doing a few albums, I realized that my album directories were becoming very polluted with the songs showing up as duplicated. At this point, I'm not sure how to keep the low bitrate versions around for my portable player AND have the high bitrate versions for PC use coexist without mucking up the directories. I may like some of the songs, but I don't need to hear them twice in a row when playing back an album on my PC.

In my mind, the solution could be as simple as setting the desired bitrate to use when syncing with your portable device, and have WMP downsample them on the fly - not sure how much that would slow down the transfer, but it would take care of those who have smaller capacity portable players, but still want high bitrate music on the desktop. Maybe WMP offers this already, but I haven't come across it......

[Jason Dunn]

In my mind, the solution could be as simple as setting the desired bitrate to use when syncing with your portable device, and have WMP downsample them on the fly - not sure how much that would slow down the transfer, but it would take care of those who have smaller capacity portable players, but still want high bitrate music on the desktop. Maybe WMP offers this already, but I haven't come across it......

It can, and it does. ;-) When your Pocket PC is connected, go into TOOLS > OPTIONS > DEVICES then you should see the memory card for your Pocket PC. Click on it, then select PROPERTIES and you'll have the option to select a specific bit rate for that device. And you're done - WMP will transcode for that device. :D

[Video11]

...snip...
It can, and it does. ;-) When your Pocket PC is connected, go into TOOLS > OPTIONS > DEVICES then you should see the memory card for your Pocket PC. Click on it, then select PROPERTIES and you'll have the option to select a specific bit rate for that device. And you're done - WMP will transcode for that device. :D

Cool. Wish I knew about this a month ago. I just ripped most of my library at 128kps so I could fit more onto my Zen Micro. Had I known about this option I might have ripped at a higher bit rate. I don't know if I will go through the effort now.

[mcsouth]

:D Jason, thanks a ton! I will try this out this weekend and see if I can't salvage some of the mess I've managed to make!

Considering that my job is writing technical documentation, you'd think that I would be smart enough to "read the manual" on this stuff, but I suspect that I'm like a lot of people - pressed for time, and too many things to work with to spend the time fully learning all of the capabilities on each. At least I know which end of my leaf rake is the business end....... :lol:

[Jason Dunn]

Nah, don't feel bad - the reality is that WMP isn't very discoverable, there's no wizard to help guide you through the initial setup...it's really kind of clunky in that regard.

[Jonathon Watkins]

I would like the library to display all the albums, sorted by artist, just like Musicmatch does. I don't want to click down on the artist to get at albums, but it would be good to be able to see all the albums on the top level, with the tracks displayed and selectable at the next level down.

I would have thought that this was a logical arrangement as it is how many folks organise their music collection. Or is that just me? :)

I would also like to see the album art in the library.

I use Musicmatch for ripping as it gives more control, but boy is it flaky. WMP works well in that regard, as it plays on all 4 of my speakers and it sounds better than MM. It is just harder to navigate however. :?

[Jason Dunn]

One of the things I find frustrating is how sluggish WMP is with large libraries. For instance, when I load WMP on my new computer (that's very fast) it essentially locks up for about 5-10 seconds while it tries to load the 13,000 song library. Why not load the library in the background? Or have it load progressively?

The "folder monitoring" is also a source of great frustration for me. I have about 70 GB of music and it sits on a central server. The other computers on my LAN access the music over the network, but folder monitoring only works well LOCALLY. It's a completely wreck over the network, and it causes a lot of frustration. :evil: