Anyone here using Windows Media Player 11 beta?

[Jason_Cross]

I’ve been running WMP11 for awhile now, and I like it.

It does some background indexing and (if you set the Tools -> Options this way) getting missing data for your audio library, which you can kind of force by using the “Apply Media Information Changes” menu item. Once it’s built the index, it’s really quite fast. It’s much much faster than WMP10 at browsing my music library (about 4,500 tracks or so), and faster than iTunes, too. Plus it does the whole word-wheel incremental search thing, and it’s pretty cool how it shows your albums and artists and stuff in stacks, and you can scroll through it really smooth and fast. As a music organization/browsing thing, I like it better than iTunes.

It’s got good ripping and burning options, and the sync stuff works really nicely with some of the newer compatible players (read: all the new players that aren’t iPods). It’s even got reverse sync, which is a great way to get music OFF your portable player.

Of course it’s still a video player, and works just fine for that - not much different from WMP10. As long as you have a directshow codec for whatever you’re playing, it works.

If you use WMP10 or (god forbid) WMP9 for anything, there’s really no reason not to upgrade.

[Bill_Dungsroman]

@Udarnik

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.

Super. You told a dude not to bother with MP11 because it uses mp3 which like only you don’t use. Advice is is for other people, you know?

[Udarnik]

@Bill_Dungsroman

Super. You told a dude not to bother with MP11 because it uses mp3 which like only you don’t use. Advice is is for other people, you know?

Uh, no. ExecutionerFive asked what our experiences with it were and said it looked like it had some cool new features.

I said it had two (2) new features that I could tell (thanks to Jason for filling me in on its faster index. I haven’t put enough tracks into it to compare it to iTunes), and that the one thing that I expect a music player to do (play music) is limited because it only understands its own proprietary format. Oh, yeah, and mp3s as of last version. That’s not advice, that’s an observation.

If you want advice, then Jason is absolutely right. If you’re using WMP now, upgrade. If you’re not then all the reasons you aren’t (you have an iPod, you watch Matroska/OGG videos, you have a big collection of mp4s) are still obstacles.