Windows Media Player 11 Gripes

The original title for this post is ‘Shit I Don’t Like about Windows Media Player 11’ but it seemed too offensive. In an ambivalent attempt to get this article read by engineers up in Redmond using Google (or maybe some Windows Live RSS feed), I left out the profanity in the title.

First of all, it’s important remember that version 11 came out for XP in October 2006. And almost as soon it was installed and running, I noticed that it no longer displayed the total duration of tracks in the “Now Playing” list. It would never surprise me that some “savvy” marketing rube shamed some engineer into removing this display because the “real” ideal young people representing the fictional target market of Windows media “culture” don’t care about the total time of their play list.

The problem is that you farm boys have just offended the Windows-centric, 43-folders crowd because we are creative enough to use music as a way to mark time. This is a way to use Windows Media Player as a sort of alarm clock—as a productivity tool. This certainly sounds bizarre to some 30-year-old in Redmond trying to dress up like a 19-year-old with their meticulous market research.

Here are the other minor usability gripes:

• The Play All command is a non-optional default choice when you click on one media item. This is counterintuitive. When I click on one track I expect it to play one track. The kids can’t be at a party all the time—and they don’t need that much help to play lot’s of media to keep whatever lively.
• When you remove a monitored folder with the Add To Library dialog (F3), it does not actually remove it from the Library and you have to see the Folder view in the library to make sure it is gone. Mysterious duplicate entries can show up in Windows Media Player because, say, \\MyComputer\foo\ and C:\MyMusic\foo\ point to the same location.
• When the player is minimized, we should have the option to see album art appearing with each new song play. Further, we should have a new song appear (with album art) in a fade-in-fade-out manner like what the blokes on the Outlook team do with incoming email messages. In general, album art is underused in most media suites (probably more legal and false-boundary bullshit). How come the iTunes folks have no trouble nurturing album art?
• The play list system in Windows Media Player is just not right and even I am not nerdy enough to take the time to explain why. But using XML is a start.Certainly the next version of Windows Media Player will be obsessed with trying to fuse Zune awareness with iTunes-like imitations. My little gripes are low on the list.

rasx()