Windows Media Player 11

I am going to make the effort and trying to do more smaller blogs than grouping stuff up, looks easier on the eyes.

Windows Media Player has now been out for three or four days and the general concensus seems be good, really liking the x64 edition and have been waiting for it for quite some time having had a look at the first beta on Media Center 2005 before I chose to migrate back to x64 (for some reason) - and Vista of course.

This post has a few points of course as my posts generally do, so here we go. Firstly I like WMP11 alot, most of my music was pretty organised already so the qualms I had with the first beta aren't so important

-- Basically I had an album that was split into three different albums and I couldn't find a way of merging them into a single album without using a third party bit of kit in the RTW version I actually had the same issue after searching for some album art but the drag and drop method seemed to work this time around, excellent stuff --

Having upgraded my X-Fi drivers and switching crystallisation on, some top of the range Zalman headphones listening to an album for the first time after upgrading frankly sounded better than it should have done - it shouldn't have really sounded any different - but the combination of all those features coming together at one moment really started things off with a good vibe.

Another good thing was actual proper MTP support in WindowsXP x64 edition as people have become accustomed to in WindowsXP, ie being able to see it in My Computer (and now it actually shows your device if it is up-to-date rather than a generic icon), although not so necessary these days as Media Player can now sync both ways, just make sure you know where your reverse synced music is going (generally the same place as ripped music anyway). the only issue so far seems to be that once the MTP device is docked, in this case a Creative Zen Vision:M it won't undock - I don't mean physically of course, it doesn't somehow become glued to the computer - and therefore go into an idle state. Therefore it stays on all night long? Why not undock it at night? Because I charge the device so I can listen to it at work - so not so unreasonable? However, I don't know if this is a Creative issue or a Microsoft issue, there is a discussion about it here anyway ( http://forums.creative.com/creativel...ssage.id=16092 )

I first heard about Media Center for WindowsXp back in May (via http://www.thehotfix.net/comments.php?shownews=211 or via another site that links to it, as I don't honestly visit the Hotfix), so how much of this original and so close it has to be true list of specifications does the final version come (I will omit the enchance Vista stuff at the moment and re-evaluate that once I have the final version running on my production system)

* New UI
* Support for better synchronization for portable devices
* Album “stacks” of album art
* Indexed libraries with search-as-you-type features
* User controlled downgrade of quality for DRM content to allow for smaller files
* DRM content will contain metadata that shows what the user is allowed to do with the file
* Includes Microsoft and MTV’s Urge music store

Seems all the above is true, I read about a feature that would let me play Music in WMP11 (including DRM media) directly from my player, but I have been unable to refind that information, it was something I was really looking forward to, but again it could well be a Vista feature. I will keep searching.

As far as sharing media, my WMP11 did detect my Xbox 360, but the Xbox 360 was unable to return the favour and could not see any of the media that I had decided to share, I will keep trying.