Just was wondering what people’s experiences were with it–seems like it has some cool features.
I am (as well as the free 2 week trial of Urge). It’s got some infuriating features/bugs, though… trying to look stuff up on Urge can cause all sorts of freezing… I’m getting random application of equalizers on minimization (or stripping of equalizers, or some other effect which is mucking with the sound quality making it randomly brighter or more muted). Overall I don’t see much difference aside from the built in urge stuff… (it still just silently barfs on videos without either finding or prompting me to download new codecs as well).
I installed it.
I took a short peek, and realized it’s still a bloated mess, albeit a hog of a media player with the kinda cool (probably due to novelty that will soon wear off) Windows Vista look.
I immediately went back to Media Player Classic for all of my video watching needs, and iTunes for audio.
Been using it but I’m not a big media player user anyway. It seems fine to me. The biggest difference I’ve found is…the default colour scheme. Goes to show how much time I spend with it. ;)
You reject WMP for being bloated but use iTunes for music instead? Hah. You’d be better off with Winamp, or any of a number of other possibilities.
It works. I’ve been using it off and on and, as others have said, it’s basically WMP 10 with a built-in music store and a new skin. It still doesn’t play or encode any of the formats I use, though, but if you don’t mind strapping yourself into unportable proprietary Microsoft media formats, it’s a pretty decent player.
WMP 10 encodes MP3. I’m not a big music guy, but it seems like MP3 is pretty portable. Do you just not want to change the settings? Or is the WMP Mp3 encoding feature not very robust?
Oh, I know. iTunes is a pig, too, but it works well with my iPod (and yes, I’ve tried ephPod) and it works the way my brain does in terms of cataloguing and locating music. In fact, WMP11 seems to me to be Microsoft doing all that it can to rip off Apple’s UI without outright copying it.
Winamp added iPod and portable device support some number of versions ago.
Sorry, that’s just my inner snob showing through – MP3 is a last-generation format so I didn’t consider it, even though WMP did add built-in support for MP3 encoding with version 10, I believe. IMHO any player that doesn’t support playback and encoding for Ogg, MP4, and FLAC (which are all portable between Windows, Mac, and Linux) is suboptimal, and any player that doesn’t support at least one of them is worthless (WMP supports Ogg through a plug-in, so it’s just above trash bin material for me). None of this matters, of course, if you don’t mind the aggravation of re-ripping all your music. I’d just prefer to avoid it.
MP3 is a last-generation format
Thanks, now I feel decrepit. :)
I haven’t found a reason to switch off WMP since 7…the other programs I’ve used all ended up disappointing me in one way or another. So 11 will definately be on here when its out (no version for XP x64 yet.)
I’ve noticed a really annoying problem with WMP 11. For whatever reason, the audio quality of the files I’m listening to (192 KBPS WMA) degrades substantially if I minimize the window. I get a lot more noise. I thought it was possibly interference from the rest of my machine since I’m using a laptop and the audio is noisy anyway, but I can keep the same visible windows above the player and it’s not noisy… for some reason minimizing the window causes noise. Very bizarre.
You don’t consider mp3? That’s not merely snobbery U, it’s…kind of stupid.
With all this last generation format talk, anyone know a really fast mp3-ogg converter that could burn through a… relatively large collection of mp3s quickly? :)
WMP11 won’t work with my iPod. Kinda a deal breaker.
Oh noes! You took the bait!
Better quality for smaller filesizes is where its at when dealing with 4 gb iPods and 20 gb laptop harddrives and music collections that include many hundreds of cds. I usually encode mp3s in the 250-something kbs range, and ogg or mp4 at 160-something (which is where my hearing gives up and I can’t tell the difference anymore). It adds up.
Are you sure? Transcoding between lossy formats is usually a losing proposition…
Shhhh!
I’ve always thought that the best way to have your music collection has gotta be FLAC or some other nice lossless format and then just transcode to whatever FOTM is… In my case it’s been 256kbps VBR MP3 for a couple years now.
FLAC is still pretty space-filling though, isn’t it?
Also it’s not particularly feasible to say “Hey, I want to switch out 4GB of music on my IPOD… first I’ll spend an hour transcoding the FLACs…”