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Windows Media Player
Todays software sucks is Windows Media Player, a product I'm generally happy with. It's one major downside is it's really slow with a large library, and my library isn't that large - only 11,000 songs or so (so far, I hven't finished ripping the classical stuff yet). But two things I've hit this morning. First, after a rip it crashed. No surprise there, it does it occasionally. But the annoying thing is that when you start it up again it disables the plug-ins because "they may have been the cause of the problem". Right, wouldn't be your own code would it, no siree. The other problem I have is with editing track details, especally the Find Album Information side of things, which gives you fixed width text boxes. Ick. But what's worse is that if you are editing the details via this site, and switch to the library tab, you lose your changes. Well, don't switch, might be your comment, but when editing mult-disc albums, as many classical ones are, you often have a complex list of artists/performers, and may want to flip back to your library to copy that from disc 1. Fine, unless you want to copy two lots of information, in which case the first lot you copy and paste into the editor gets lost. Actually, in general, I think the whole tagging thing is poor for classical music. It would be so nice to have rich meta data describing the soloists, the orchestra, conductor etc. Roll on Vista.
[Listening to: L'Estro Armonico 12 Concerto No 9 in D Major I Allegro - The Academy of Anciente Music - Vivaldi L`Estro Armonico Disco II]
posted on Tuesday, December 13, 2005 9:55 AM Print
Comments
 re: Windows Media Player
Leigh Kendall
12/13/2005 1:22 PM
Dave -

I've run into the same problem. I have a rather large library of old Jazz, Blues, Classical and classic Rock. The music database the WM uses does indeed s*ck.

What I've resorted to, (and I know there are taggers out there, but I like to have the info right while ripping) is to actually use Windows Explorer as my "music manager" for the library. This works well if you've ripped correctly.

To rip AND play, I use a great free player (written in VC6++) called VUPlayer; you can find it at vuplayer.com. It is a simple music player that will play all obscure music formats. It uses freedb.org for the tagging which I've found to be quite good. The author also has an older player called Player (plays CD's only, no digital formats) that does ripping as well (and identically to VUPlayer) which uses Gracenote for tagging instead of freedb.org. Gracenote is VERY good for providing information on Classical/Jazz CD's; especially older and relabeled stuff.

Try them... I've been very very happy with both. I normally load up both players to see which db has better CD info; Gracenote or Freedb, then I rip with the one with more info, but I always playback using VUPlayer. It even has the "old" style VU Meters. Love it!

Try it, you won't regret it!

HTH...
 re: Windows Media Player
Dave
12/13/2005 1:41 PM
Cool, thanks. I'll take a look at them. I do have a tag editing program too, which is pretty good as it analyses for missing tags.

Freedb - there's something from my past. When I had the first alpha of .net 1.0 (way before public alphas) I wrote a FreeDb server that used SQL Server for storage. Never quite got it finished.
 re: Windows Media Player
Calum
12/31/2005 1:26 PM
It's organisation abilities are complete fking crap. I ripped some CDs, put them into folders, and then it connected to the internet and completely trashed my folder structure, with several albums into the same folder, completely wrecked hours of ripping. I'll never touch WMP again with a barge-pole.
 re: Windows Media Player
Dave
12/31/2005 2:28 PM
Calum - I had the same problem early on, but WMP will only re-arrange your physical files if you have the "rearrange music in rip music folder" option set (Tools | Options | Library). I think this is set as default.
 re: Windows Media Player
andy
1/25/2006 8:08 AM
Sorry guys, i do have to admit i like the satisfy the masses aspect of MP10. BUT, i have 14,000 in my collection, which i just spent 3 weeks organising tags, to take advantage of mp10 library function........ it turned out to be too slow to use. i can get about my tracks with explorer better. 14000 is not a large amount of records by any database standard.... what are MS using?????????????????
i am cranky.
 re: Windows Media Player
S
2/14/2006 5:55 PM
I sympathise with you. Im actually very frustrated with slow startup, slow search, bad tagging (yes bad tagging, even mistagging my files). Reason i cant switch is because i love the integration WMP has with windows shell itself... Like 'right click add to now playing', from the side menu 'Play all'. I wish WMP11 lives up to its status.
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