Microsoft releases WMP 11: is anybody listening?
I just took a quick glance at my RSS feeds before setting in for Monday Night Football; big game tonight as I'm down by a point this week in Fantasy Football. I have Tom Brady while my opponent has the Minnesota defense, but we all know I should win because I used superior technology, right? Ri-i-i-ght....
Anyway, I just noticed in my aggregator that Microsoft has a press release out: Windows Media Player 11 was released today for Windows XP. Here's the funny part: I don't see anyone mentioning this on techmeme or the other major tech news sites. Granted, I'm rushing to get my hot wings and beer ready for the big game, so I'm not "digg"-ing around too much. Still, this has me wondering: does the public care about Windows Media Player 11?
For what it's worth, I've used it in the Vista beta and it's a much more robust player. The new URGE music service is worth a look too. If you don't believe me, that's OK: Paul Thurrott is one of those "much smarter than me" folks and he has an early review from back in May. Better yet, give it a try yourself right here. It's got a higher version number, so it has to better right? Sure, if you believe that you'll believe that the Patriots passed me by for Tom Brady too. ;)
WMP 11 did manage to set my MP3 preferences in IE7 back to what they were before iTunes with Quicktime hogged them. I know how to reset the file associations from inside Firefox - but how do you do it in IE7? The file types tab in IE6 didn't seem to do the trick.
Posted by: Mickey Segal | October 30, 2006 at 09:44 PM
What a coincedence, I was down a point in fantasy football going into this game also. Thanks to Doug Gabriel and his five catches, I won! Hope you did too!
Posted by: William | October 30, 2006 at 11:05 PM
Meh. I tried it out when it was in beta, and while it seemed better than WMP10, it still doesn't have netcasting capabilities. I liked the way it listed out individual albums with their tracks, but I still prefer iTunes' library pick list, especially since it's netcast-friendly.
On the synchronization front, when I used it for my Gigabeat S, it seemed a bit unpredictable (but it could've been my newbie-ness with WMP11 playlists and sync settings), deleting some of the tracks from my Gigabeat S when I didn't expect it to. It also had issues with not syncing album art to the Gigabeat S properly (dunno if that's fixed in the final version).
Before WMP11, I made it a point not to use WMP if I didn't have to (VLC and Quicktime were preferred). Even after playing around with the WMP11 beta, I still feel the same way.
Posted by: Cheryl | October 31, 2006 at 02:04 AM
I love it! It looks great and my media library loads much quicker. Searches are literally instant and WMP 11 even starts and shuts down quicker than WMP 10!
It is very strange indeed that nobody seems to care about this. For me the difference between WMP 10 and 11 is much more significant than for example the difference between FF 1.5 and 2.0 :)
Now all I have to do is find a good Vista skin for my Windows XP install...
Posted by: Johan | October 31, 2006 at 03:24 AM