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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"
I wouldn't call buying a copy of window a "free" upgrade
I didn't found something funny to put here.
From TFA, it's only for WinXP.
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
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.
Foobar 2000
It's FOSS, so the GUI is generally crap (it's as unitiuitive as other media players while still being ugly and unskinnable by default) but it's very lightweight and unobtrusive. It's been in development a long time and is quite mature.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
The organization nightmare you can pretty much sidestep by simply hitting "Organize By Song"-- it'll just revert to what is basically the WMP10 organization scheme that we've all come to love and/or hate. The GUI problem is understandable, given that I am running XP in classic mode. I'll give it this though: it'll look hella cool once you run it inside the vista mothership. Mind you, that doesn't make the startup trainwreck any better. MS could have done a much better job there.
After the initial shock though, the nice things start to make themselves evident. The search is oh so responsive-- finally, it's up to par with itunes "show results as you type" deal. I haven't worked too much with setting up successive filters (I'm only a few minutes into the acclimatization process), but it looks like if you click on the library category (album, song, genre etc), and then start typing in the search box, results are organized by the category in question. Cool... it may actually be better in terms of search flexibility than iTunes. The privacy options appear to be better than 10, although given the DRM crap that is lurking under the surface, I don't know if the privacy options are just a whitewash (any privacy experts care to weigh in?). The application itself feels infinitely faster and more responsive than 10 ever was-- especially when it's recovering to window mode from the taskbar "mini" mode.
I'm a qualified fan at this stage-- I'll use WMP11 for audio organization, but VLC will remain my primary video viewing app.
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
No, WMP 11 does not add DRM restrictions to anything you rip. WMP 10 didn't either. Heck, it can rip to MP3 and WAV if you want, which don't even have DRM! Where do you get thus FUD?
I've found foobar2000 to be very nice. It's a typical hacker-player that can be mod'ed to do anything you want it to, but the base is just a simple, lightweight music player with a library, superb format-support (except iTunes MPEG4 lossless) and otherwise no fuzz.
I ditched Winamp5 for Foobar when I saw Winamp using 200MBs+ of RAM with my current music-library. Plus Winamp is shit and doesn't support unicode.Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
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.