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Windows Media Player 11 Released
filenavigator writes "Microsoft issued a press release today publicizing the release of Windows Media Player 11. Looks like the major updates in this version are for the Microsoft marketing engine. Features boasted by Microsoft include better integration with media players sanctioned by them, and integration with their new URGE music service. Additionally, and more importantly, this version contains the latest in Microsoft DRM software. Interested parties can download a free copy"
Hey, can we wait until the comments before the anti-MS vitrol and fud? Does it have to start right in the article itself? Sheesh.
Additionally, and more importantly, this version contains the latest in Microsoft DRM software. Interested parties can download a free copy"
You're saying it like DRM is a feature.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
I tried apt, but it didn't work. Does anybody have the source packages so I can compile it myself?
Aside from all the new DRM stuff, it looks to me as though they wanted a new GUI to correspond with Vista's graphics instead of XP's graphics. The blue theme is gone, replaced by a black theme.
No voluntary DRM for me. Not that I even run Windows anyway...
The big problem is that all the videos that I'm interested in are already uploaded to YouTube.
All the audio I'm interested in is uploaded to BitTorrent.
I prefer to live offline, away from my computer, so all the slickness in the world doesn't mean squat when I'm not going to be sitting in front of the monitor anyway.
Features boasted by Microsoft include better integration with media players sanctioned by them
I think these guys have got this one covered: http://www.apple.com/itunes/
Per TFA, "only for Windows XP." So does Microsoft itself admit Vista isn't ready for prime-time?
"Interested parties can download a free copy" Richard Stallman has a word to say to the submitter.
Care about privacy? Read this!
Err, i hate buying a upgrade in ram JUST to run a media player, ill stick to mplayer command line interface. of course there is foobar
Wulfram 2 -- Free Online 3D game, Runs on a PII!
Must be really "slownewsday"...
Save the world from WMP 11.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Can someone tell me what the deal is with WMP's GUI? I noticed around WMP 7 that they started breaking every Windows convention in the book. I stuck with Mplayer2 for a long time until I discovered Media player classic. Has the GUI improved? Does it blend in well with Vista's way of doing things and that's why its different? Or is it just poorly designed and confusingly implemented like I expect it is?
Or maybe you'd rather try to slide a tiny dark slider along a tiny dark track and skip around that way.
Didn't *anyone* at microsoft take an HCI class in college?
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I wouldn't call buying a copy of window a "free" upgrade
I didn't found something funny to put here.
So I have to go through an annoying and possibly bogus WGA check and pray it doesn't result in a false positive if I want to download Windows Defender, you know, a security tool, but I they impose no such checks if I want to download a simple DRM-infested media player? Nice priorities there, Microsoft.
I might install it just to keep things up-to-date with the WMV support. I use Media Player Classic and VLC for most videos anyway, but I still installed previous versions of WMP so that the codecs it installed were complete, and I assume this will have newer codec versions too.
In other words, it's a back-end update for me. It sure as shit doesn't have the functionality/ease of use that something like MPC has.
I'll wait for the Linux version.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I'm still using mplay32.exe (still bundled with XP) and have found no convincing reason to change to wmplayer.exe
Parhaps someday MS will release a new version that is simpler to use and geared towards letting me listen to music without interuping my workflow, but not today.
It is a lot faster. When I just want to double-click a file to see what the hell it is - it comes up right quick now.
Digital restrictions management is a feature for residential end users only because it is a feature for the publishers: it makes publishers more likely to consider publishing works in the format.
I can't remember the last time I used WMP for anything. Media Player Classic handles all the media I would ever bother downloading. So there is really no incentive, at least not for me.
From TFA:
Does anyone out there know of a media player that just plays MP3s, and Wav files without in-your-face advertising for the media companies?
Its a fair question. Does anyone know of a simple player
that just plays the music and gets the heck out of the way.
It just keeps a list of your MP3s and will play and then minimise?
And for you apple fanboys, itunes is no better than WMP in this regard.
I am sure I am not the only one who still uses mplayer2 (Media Player 6.x) for most stuff.
Bloat just plain sucks and when mplayer2 is no longer useable I am pretty sure I will seek a 3rd party media player because MS players pretty blow.
Oh and another thing, when was the last time the media player codec download actually found the required codec and installed it for you? I do not think I can think of a single time personally.
I have a Sandisk Sansa e270. For some reason, I just don't want to buy an iPod Nano. Guess I'm just cheap? This is the next best thing - 6gb of flash, small, similar interface, half the price.
I used to use WMP10 to sync my files. It wasn't the most convenient method, but it beat doing the sync by turning the Sansa into a USB drive (it reboots forever, updating some databases). Selecting which files to sync up was fairly simple, and the syncing was fast. The biggest complaint I had was that it didn't really understand the concept of syncing on multiple computers (home and office). One has to become the main computer and the other... I dunno.
I installed the WMP11 beta, because I was hoping that that part of syncing would have been fixed. Well, I regret that decision now. Luckily, I'm going to reinstall this computer soon anyway.
Basically, syncing is incredibly slow now, the interface much less intuitive and for some reason it keeps uploading copies of the same files. I gave up on getting that sync right. I'm downloading the final version, I'll install it probably tomorrow.
m
Nice try M$, but I think I'll be sticking with AmaroK on Gentoo. I'd rather not have DRM pushed down my throat.
Microsoft may consider their latest DRM a Feature, however I consider it a Bug.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What's up with the made up terms like 'Reverse sync', 'gas gauge', 'visual navigation' to describe what are very basic features.
Should we start applying them to general computer use too?
'Hey Bob, I need you to reverse sync that report to my computer, so you don't run out of gas, check the gas gauge, and you'll receive a great sync experience.'
Sorry, but I think that the PC media player was perfected win Winamp 2.8. Literally. I think it's about as easy to use and powerful as you can ever get. iTunes is impossibly bloated and buggy. Windows Media Player is the most confusing interface I could ever imagine. Winamp is tiny, very powerful (if you want it to be), and *very* easy to use. I don't care how many shiny buttons MS MP and ITunes add, they both just get continueally worse with every version (and admittedly, so did the early Winamp 5.x versions). And really, how many different possible ways do you need to play music? How many iterations of "play" ans "stop" can there possibly be?
Yes, and Vista is taking the other 99.5%.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I want to know if the browser plugin will work well with Opera/FF. Any one tried yet ?
I don't want a signature.
Why is it microsoft can't make a gui that doesn't take more screen space than the actual content?
Freeamp, which is now called Zinf due to complaints from the Winamp people, is what you want. No ads. No phoning home. No DRM. No nonsense. Open source. Runs on Windows and Linux.
The interface is considerably improved but still remains a gray mess. An improvement over the blue mess. It is now immediately clear where your music is and where the play button is.
The integrated store is a trainwreck. I got IE script errors on first visit, while I am immediately bombarded with EULA and "Install URGE" pop-ups. After installing the binary, it takes me to a cluttered black webpage. Search is a visual mess, and I receive a "SUBSCRIBE NOW!" interstitial while traveling to an album from Search view.
No thanks. Better luck with 12.
I keep hoping that we're going to see a true cross-platform video format that will just work "out of the box" with the major OSes the way MPEG-1 did. With all the recent advancements in codecs, I sure would like to see something considered a standard that would just work for everyone without needing to download some other player or codec. I was hoping .mp4 might be it, but it looks like Media Player 11 doesn't support it.
Is there really no modern video format that works "out of the box" for all the major OS players?
finally fixed their DRM.
Personally I wont watch anything that REQUIRES a license, whether it be on Windows or *nix.
... I mean, if you're an evil pirate.
otherwise it would have been called innovation instead.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Can anyone tell me whether this new version will play .ogg files by default? If not where can one grab a plug-in? Thanx.
How about - in the link about the new features - actually talking about the new features? Instead of just a blogger bashing Media Player?
How about someone try it out and see if the "audio fingerprinting" works? That seems like a VERY useful feature, IMO!
I am the maverick of Slashdot
You're posting smugly here. So, maybe that new interface would work out for you since you're online and all.
I just tried installing the new media player, and i want to remove it before it causes any more damage. It seemed to want to eat all the metadata tags from my mp3 files and replace it with something else. For some reason, it wants to change all the artist and title info from a correctly labeled Al Green album and wants to replace it with Connie Francis. If i relabel it correctly and have it rescan the files it tries to label it incorrectly again, even though i have the option to only add missing information and not the overwrite all media information setting to get information from the internet. It is weird. I i go to play the song, a picture of Connie Francis shows up, even though it says the artist name is Al Green. And Al Green only has three songs but Connie has the rest. Same with my Beatles Abbey Road album. It has three songs but cant find the rest even though the tags are all correct in the correct folder. Also it is MUCH slower searching through my media files for changed things now. It definitely needs to go away and i will use something else!
songbirdnest.com
Check it out. The program is still in development (big time, but it's already head and shoulders above anything else I've been able to find...
... or available on the Mac. - I can neither .DaMaGe [read .dmg] it nor make install it.
- I don't even use windows
- I can't use it
- As it is, I don't care
Thus M$ sucks. Hence proved.
Usability Engineer, Master in Human Computer Interaction
Man, I thought the one "marked-WMP!11!" I got from Limewire 6 months ago looked alot like WMP10 !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I mean seriously, what the fuck is the point of posting this here? Damn astroturfers modding up Linux-bashing...
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Not only should you not get WMP11 intentionally, the fact that there's a RTM for it should make you think about turning off Windows Update (if you haven't already). At least make sure you have a disk-image backup before installing it, or you'll probably be kicking yourself down the road.
y er/11/readme.aspx:
w ww.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/11/re adme.aspx
= 49&PostID=144193
From http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/pla
"Windows Media Player 11 does not permit you to back up your media usage rights (previously known as licenses)."
"Digital media files must be in stored in monitored folders for media sharing to work properly in Windows Media Player 11."
"Content that is protected with media usage rights cannot be played in Windows Media Player 10 if a computer already has the Windows Media Format 11 Runtime installed."
The following issue from the Beta release isn't mentioned in the official release notes, but the fact that it appeared in the beta indicates that MS was preparing their DRM platform for a new time-limit "feature" that can be applied to recorded TV on their Media Center products (at the request of broadcasters, of course):
"Recorded TV shows that are protected with media usage rights, such as some TV content recorded on premium channels, will not play back after 3 days when Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2 for Windows XP is installed on Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. No known workaround to resolve this issue exists at this time."
At time of posting, this could still be found at:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:Eah4zybQy4sJ:
I'm not pulling that speculation out of my butt, either. They already add more restrictions to DVD playback than any other software or consumer DVD player does. DVD playback is prohibitied in Media Center Edition when your display device is set to > 640 x 480 resolution (as is the case for HDTV use):
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894323
Even today, as of Rollup 2, Media Center Edition renders recorded TV unplayable after two weeks when the broadcaster requests it:
http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/rss.aspx?ForumID
I would be extremely surprised if down the road a bit we don't discover that WMP11 is a trojan horse for a slew of previously unheard of content restrictions.
By day I'm a developer on the Microsoft platform. By night I'm an XP Media Center Edition user who's scared & angry enough to invest research time I don't have into MythTV & [Ubuntu || Mandriva || Fedora]. As far as home usage goes, I'm sorry, but this former Redmond fanboy / apologist is done with MS.
Pi Ran Out
thank you ms very much for this shit. i am happy i will never use it. :D
C'mon, it's just begging for an allusion to This is Spinal Tap.
Warning: The intelligence of this post may be larger than it appears.
Interested parties running linux, should do one of the following:
yum install mplayer
yum install vlc
apt-get install mplayer
apt-get install vlc
I can certainly download something that claim to be a copy of WMP11, but all I get is a pop-up complaining about WGA. Now, mind, I've got a license of windows. I can't find it. So I downloaded Windows XP. HELO Fair Use. Of course MS doesn't want me to see Media Player 11 because other people have stolen Windows from them.
In fairness, let me say that I have one Windows machine, and it exists almost entirely for Yahoo Music Player streaming into my living room, and for Counter-Strike on occasion. My other computers are all Ubuntu boxen, save the mac mini I got last week.
WGA = DRM = record players that won't play everyone's records. My Fair Use rights are being violated and no one will make it stop.
While I'm ranting, let me talk about the Angels & Airwaves CD. I had just explained DRM to my uncle for the first time when I picked up this album. On first seeing the actual disc, I was greeted with some 'SoundTone' or some such nonsense logo by the FBI warnings the media companies think I want cluttering up CD art. Knowing that RedBook is RedBook, I could only assume this had less to do with Sound or Tone and more to do with Fucking My Shit Up Because The Companies Know They Can. Sure enough, I popped it in and it wouldn't play.
When I bought that CD, I bought what was advertised as a RedBook disc. What I got was a $20 coaster that I can't use (because seriously, if I'm listening on my computer I'm not going to go searching for the disc). I have since vowed to download my music, because downloading leaves me feeling less like I got 0wned. I had stopped downloading music (remember the Yahoo Music mention?), and now they've reminded me why I should.
-knewter
b) how come a fresh, first-time, install of MediaMonkey detected "itunes" on my system, even though I removed it months ago?
I consider myself pretty adept at figuring out things for myself, especially when it comes to new software, especially when it comes to audio software. After a short ammount of time, I have been able to get advanced, professional audio programs up and running (mind you, on a basic level), even with such daunting software as Pro Tools, Cubase, Sibelius, Finale, etc.
So I downloaded WMP11, and I suddenly found myself staring at the screen, not having a friggin' clue where to even begin. It was literally the first time I felt like I had been stumped by a seemingly simplistic piece of software. Yes, there were all sorts of pretty buttons, some of which I REEEEEEEALY wanted to press - but all I actually wanted to do was play some fucking Zeppelin. Clicking on those fancy buttons only made things worse...I got lost and actually gave up. This has to be the worst GUI I have ever seen. I can't WAIT for my father to download this, a man who has to be reminded every time he touches the remote to press the CBL button, or he'll change the channel on the TV rather than the Cable Box.
It brought back a memory I thought I had repressed, when after almost 20 years of piano training, I began playing the organ which includes a four-octave keyboard to be played by your feet. I felt like a 5 year old all over again, my co-ordination just vanishing. My ego took a huge beating then, and it's taken another one just now.
I stick with iTunes because I like the "browser", which filters the songs by Genre, then Artist, then album. Yes, I know it's bloated, but I've managed to forgive them for that. Meanwhile, I found JetAudio to be a pretty good plyaer, and am downloading Media Player Classic as I type.
I'm still searching for the one player that "gets it right". Any more ideas? Send'em my way...
What about its license? I haven't bothered with WMP since version 9 because of ridiculous requirements. Something along the line of having to allow MS to scan my HD, I think. Until they release a version of WMP with a less intrusive license, I'll stick to MPC, thankyouverymuch.
Take life easy: one bit at a time.
I'm not a microsoft fanboy at all but WMP11 is a hell of a lot better than your article makes out, and certainly a lot better than WMP10. Stop with the bias already! Is it too hard for Slashdot to be unbiased about product??? Honestly, I've enjoyed Slashdot in the past, but it really sucks quality wise at the moment.
this version contains the latest in Microsoft DRM software. Interested parties can download a free copy
Why does that sound so much like "here, take a free sniff of this crack line" to me?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
So I installed it tonight, and after a reboot tried syncing. For some reason, I had a couple of bad crashes. Might be the fact that there is also a new firmware available and the update software was interfering with WMP11. So I installed the update and now it all works!
The files that I copied onto the Sansa were correctly recognized and marked as "already on device". The rest of them copied very very quickly. Adding more files to the list works exactly as it should. It didn't remove any files or anything like that either.
I still think that the interface could be better, but at least the functionality is what it should be.
m
Is it just me or do other people also consider the WMP one of the shittiest pieces of Bundleware we still have to put up with? A bloated memory and performance hog, long outrun by it's free and shareware equivalents, a relic of the nineties with features bolted on left, right and center and a performance as bad as ever, despite computer power having increased ten-fold since back in the days.
WinAmp and VLC could do things years ago that this sorry excuse of 'convienienceware' will ever be able to do. No?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Right, well I decided to download it anyway. It requires a validation check but it's very easy to bypass with a little research. After installation it requires a restart, which amused me somewhat how a simple media player installation would require a reboot, but anyway. The player itself looks Vistafied as you'd expect, basic functionality is unchanged from previous versions. A nice things about it is the updated codecs it installed fixed a bug where viewing most .wmv files in a player other WMP (such as Media Player Classic). I found myself normally having a 2-byte file called "dxva_sig.txt" dumped into the same folder as the file being viewed, but that no longer happens in 3rd-party media players when WMP11 is installed. Apart from that, the player is pretty basic. Don't give a crap about the online stores or other functions apart from the player.
In other words, you won't miss much.
Um, xmms uses GTK1- no antialiased fonts. I prefer beep-media-player myself, it's xmms with GTK2, and looks better.
--Coder
In my experience Winamp5 sucks incredible amounts of memory when you have a decent music library. I'm talking over 200 megabytes just to have a music player running. Hint: Check VM usage and Peak memory usage aside from the seemingly compete "memory usage" in task manager.
Not to mention Winamp still doesn't do unicode. Basicly, the developers said they couldn't add unicode support without breaking the plugins back in the 2.0 days. Then they changed the model, broke the plugins and still refused to add unicode support.
In short: It's bloated, and crap. Only thing Winamp has going for it these days is the huge amount of plugins and skins.
While I will agree it's not for everyone, I really like Foobar200. On my system it uses around 13MBs of RAM, as opposed to Winamps 200MBs+.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Oh the irony. Here we have this new MEDIA PLAYER, that doesn't play media under certain conditions. Before, some of those conditions were something like broken media files, missing codecs, etc. But this one adds many new conditions, some of which might not even be told about anywhere! So it's less of a media player than other players before it since it plays media less.
Before, media players were supposed to only play media (that's why they're called 'media players', get it?) and _maybe_ give possibility to manage playlists. This one, OTOH, not only plays media (under certain unclear conditions), but also gives you ads and tells you how you can throw your money away today! SO, it does something else except plays media? Sorry that won't make it more of a media player as other players before it.
Tell me again _who_ is the biased one here? Read its name closely again: Windows MEDIA PLAYER 11, in case you've got trouble (with something I don't want to hear about). Please don't try any lame "but Apple does it too" excuse. MS is not Apple. If others do something stupid, it doesn't mean that you can do the same. Did your mom never tell you this?
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
What some of us "want" is the ability to burn our content onto a CD (so I can listen to it in the car) without using up limited burning entitlements. What some of us "want" is the ability to keep listening to our music without needing to pay a monthly subscription fee. What some of us "want" is the ability to move to another country without repurchasing our entire music collection. What some of us "want" is an unrestricted choice for our next digital music player (bought it all on iTunes? Too bad you're locked into Apple's iPod even after it ceases being the cool/best thing).
Of course, if all you "want" is the ability to listen to content on somebody else's terms and at somebody else's price, then I'm not going to interfere with your choice on that. But there's no need to treat those of us who "want" more than that as ideologically-driven weirdos.
I was wondering how the hell I could play movies.. mystery solved! Thanks Anonymous Coward!
"Interested parties?" You do know where you are, right?
WMP11 does have at least one useful feature, which is that it will stream video to an Xbox 360... up till now you'd need to have a Windows Media Centre to do this.
Check here:1 30_71.png1 3_16.png
http://pelit.koillismaa.fi/fb2k/screenshots/fb2k_
http://pelit.koillismaa.fi/fb2k/screenshots/fb2k_
http://pelit.koillismaa.fi/fb2k/index.php
And google.
Some of my friends don't have internet, so i am just asking.
"sync" is typically used to describe the process whereby the files on two different devices are copied/overwritten in order to make both devices similar and updated with latest versions.
I guess "reverse syncing" is the process of randomly removing files and overwriting new versions with old ones in order to create the most inconsistent and dissimilar state possible.
"Visual navigation" is just a term to describe that blind people will no longer be able to use it. No more beeps and warning sounds, just visuals.
The "Gas guage", though, is a very useful feature. With it, you can measure the amount of "hot air" in political broadcasts.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I have been using the the beta for quite a while and have decided that it is better than MusicMatch (v10 I believe), YME (which I have an unlimited subscription to), WMP10, and Media Monkey. I have a collection of close to 10k songs and I have found the interface for WMP11 to far more simple and easy to navigate than the previously mentioned media players. DRM is not a factor in my decision because it is not required. Most of the scary privacy things are disabled by default (at least on the beta). Sometimes I want to see what Urge has said about bands I like and they have interesting little blurbs about them.
I don't understand why everybody is making such a big stink about this. At least try it before you bash it.
When I tried an earlier beta, there was an iPod icon in WMP 11. But it didn't seem to be working. Did anyone try that?
Sent from my desktop computer
"Or maybe you'd rather try to slide a tiny dark slider along a tiny dark track and skip around that way."
Rubies and Pearls are not what you think.
Is it me or does the new WMP look almost exactly the same as Songbird?
Ah, just me then.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Songbird here. Its still a ways away from final release but looks like a pretty promising alternative to iTunes bloat and MS DRM. Plus, its built from Mozilla, available for Linux/Mac/Win, and open source.
Nobody here but us chickens.
>1% marketshare. Damn right!
Every major media player has a non-standard UI, at least on Windows. WMP is particularly bad because MS actually defines the conventions, so ought at least to stick to them.
WinAmp is the least bad: It doesn't add junk to the startup folder, fill the screen with ads for a download store, or add useless eye candy like dancing wave patterns. But its default skin is still too different from a standard Windows app.
I don't know about you guys, but I don't understand why people would prefer a media player that can't even let you sort through your library by artist, genre, etc. I find it horribly confusing to use iTunes with this limitation, especially with a large media database.
As another user posted, I think the Winamp developers got the media library interfact perfect. It was simple, organized, and efficient. Even though they have also gone off to the wayside with lots of unnecessary bloat [winamp.com], at least they got the concept right.
"Tell me again _who_ is the biased one here? Read its name closely again: Windows MEDIA PLAYER 11, in case you've got trouble (with something I don't want to hear about). Please don't try any lame "but Apple does it too" excuse. MS is not Apple. If others do something stupid, it doesn't mean that you can do the same. Did your mom never tell you this?"
I'd be curious to see your diatribes on iTunes then considering that everything you criticised WMP for has already existed in iTunes for some time. Apparently the world doesn't agree with you.
No media player plays all media formats so why don't you light into all the other failed media players as well? WMP is simply a recent "me-too" of the some of the issues you criticise.
You want to know what bias is? It's offering unfair criticism of one media player while ignoring others with similar faults. That a more apt description of your post than the parent.
... was it captive somewhere ?
...at how many people on /. actually *care* about a new WMP.
What I can't figure out is why anyone uses WMP other than the fact that it comes with Windows. I explicitly uninstall the thing and then use the K-Lite Codec Pack. It comes with every codec known to man and most importantly Media Player Classic. I've tried others, including WinAmp, but nothing comes close to the sheer speed of MPC. Admittedly, for ripping MP3s, I do tend to use WinAmp. But that and Internet Radio and Internet TV are the only things I use it for. If I want to listen to MP3s, watch any form of video file, or watch DVDs, the K-Lite Codec Pack and Media Player Classic are the way to go.
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
This has got to be a joke. WMP11 is almost a blatant 1:1 copy of iTunes - except with more usability features. First, it will monitor your music folders for changes (which iTunes will not do, you have to go through all that "consolidate library" crap), you can't one-off play music in iTunes (it automatically adds music to your library whether you want it to or not), you can't navigate back and forward in the interface with your x-left and x-right mouse clicks like in WMP11, and the general interface is set up almost identical to iTunes. I don't know what the hell you downloaded, but it wasn't WMP11.
I *do* have a few complaints about WMP11 (namely, no "minimize to tray" support out of the box), but usability is *NOT* one of them. I get the feeling you are trolling, and little else, but it certainly would not appear that you have even executed up WMP11.
A community-oriented lyrics site
I am surprised that no one mentioned the new awesome search capabilities of WMP11. And it is not just limited to the local media library. Try signing up for URGE and searching on millions of songs instantly. Now that is amazing.
Billy has to be the simplest no-crap mp3 player out there. Its very light and takes up very little memory even if you like to play 500+ mp3s in your playlist. I have been using it for about 3 years and can't even imagine going back to anything else (including winamp 2.98 which was the best version IMHO) No fancy shit. Total keyboard control.
Download it Here They have some other nifty goodies which you may want to check out too.
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
I stick with Version 9 which still allows me to play 'some' of my Streaming Radio stations. I upgraded to version 10 at one time and none of my links would work... So I went back to version 9 and everything works again.
I have no idea what you are on about. WMP11 plays media, hasn't refused anything I throw at it. I don't see ads either. I don't know what you use it for but I use it to play media. Why should it do something else other than that? WMP11 seems to be faster than WMP10, and has a better user interface.
So you're waffling on about DRM in your last paragraph. I don't use MS DRM, so it doesn't worry me. Neither does 90% of anyone else I suspect. So what you are going on about is nothing really. It is just an improved media player.