by Playfuls Staff |
21st May 2006
An article about the newest media
player coming from the
Redmond
based giant couldn't start otherwise than with the installation process. If you
have a pirated copy of Windows you will most certainly fail to upgrade from Windows
Media Player 10. The installation process stops and you are automatically redirected
towards Microsoft's webpage asking you to buy a licensed key for your OS
(Windows Genuine Advantage program). [more]
If you are the owner of a legal
copy of Windows OS then you will have no problems whatsoever during upgrading.
But only if you have the latest version of Service Pack installed (WMP will NOT
continue the upgrade process if you only have SP1 instead of SP2). And only if
you own Windows Media Center 2005 (WMC 2004 not yet supported). And only if you
have a Windows 32 bits OS (Windows 64, of course, not yet supported...) And we
haven't yet tested Vista...
Well, let's now move on the next
phase. The first thing that you see when running WMP 11 is of course the
graphical interface. A lot has been done in this domain and the eye-catching
interface is a big plus (although one might say that the default theme looks
quite similar to the one chosen long before by Songbird...). Still, an
interesting option like color tint for themes is now deactivated. If that was
one of the reasons for picking WMP instead of other media players you can
always go back from version 11 to version 10. When switching to the
mini-player, after a few seconds of inactivity, the player switches to a
transparent mode that still allows for control, but does not interfere with
browsing the web, viewing pictures, etc.
WMP 11 usually takes between 16
and 22 MB of system RAM when listening to an MP3 (more than Winamp) and up to
27 MB when watching an Xvid video (generally it takes a whole lot less than
iTunes from your RAM). Since we've come up talking about iTunes an important
mention goes to URGE, the newly integrated music download service in WMP 11, at
which Microsoft and MTV worked together in order to compete with the on-line
store from Apple. URGE has a 14-days trial period and to be able to use it
you'd have to first download it (www.urge.com)
and then have WMP 11 installed.
Not let's concentrate on what
exactly it does and what improvements were brought to this new edition. First
of all, the library has multiple options for organizing, playing, tracking, and
tagging your media. It also has an included equalizer which is far better than
that of previous versions. Music sounds much better in WMP 11, and that's not
just a simple fact. If you are a non-iPod user, synchronizing your library to
other portable media is very easy: you have two panes, one for finding tracks
and one for playlists that you'd like to transfer. This is a big plus for the
responsiveness of media library.
Concerning the quality of the
sound –mentioned earlier- WMP 11 comes with Windows Media Audio 10 Professional
codec and Windows Media Audio 9.2 codec, both combined ensuring a dazzling
sound experience.
One surprising thing though is
the fact that although the supporting operating system is Windows, we DO NOT
have the possibility of opening multiple windows of WMP and we don't even have
tabbed browsing through the files. What we can do is rip music from CD and
write ID3 tags to the physical file regardless where the rip folder is.
Curiously enough, it does not warn the user when ID3 tag writing fails. We also
have an expanded tile view and a live search of the files, but no automatic way
of "wisely" organizing the files based on track length, year, genre, etc. was
found up to the moment of writing this article.
An interesting feature of Windows
Media Player 11 is the possibility of "illustrating the album art", which means
that you can search for an image of an artist and copy the picture on the
clipboard (without locally saving), then go back to WMP 11 and paste it there
and it will be automatically edited. Still, some tracks didn't get album art
detected and with some albums, in order to get all the tracks under one album,
you'd have to go to "Edit Album Artist". You can not on the other hand remove
monitor folders, only ignore option is available.
All in all, the long expected Windows Media Player 11 is
here and it comes with a lot of modifications, amongst which the most
attractive are the graphical ones. Let's hope that these are not the only
improvements made and that chapters that have been somehow neglected (like
Internet streaming, where we found out that some sites providing it just made
WMP 11 block or crash) will be treated with more attention.
