Windows Media Player 11 has Gone To Hell
posted in Technology, Vista |I think I’m probably one of the few people who has enjoyed Windows Media Player for quite a few years. Overall its been solid, has a decent library and plays the formats that I care about, does a decent job ripping + its built into any copy of Windows. Which isn’t to say that you couldn’t make it better, just I haven’t seen anything better.
Version 11 is a major regression. For starters it hangs. Frequently. Hard. It will come back in 30 or 100 seconds or something. The music usually keeps playing but I can’t access the UI at all and skip/pause or anything. Very seriously annoying.
I also feel like the library usability has gone down. Its hard to just do some simple things like “play my whole library on shuffle” and it feels like their attempts at new visualizations are seriously slow. And its not like any of my hardware is low-end…
This is an important app as part of the Windows ecosystem and I hope there is some serious effort on fixing it. I fear that most of the effort is going into turning it into an online store for the Zune or something… Oh well, maybe its time to explore alternatives. But I want to find something that isn’t all about pimping their own music store…