Ideas for Windows Media Player 12

Here are some feature requests and ideas for Windows Media Player 12. This
is the best Microsoft forum I could find to post this informatin so hopefully
it gets read by the appropriate people. We all know that right now Apple and
iTunes is dominating in the digital music world and are trying to also take
on digital video as well. Windows Media Player has been lacking features for
years and ease of use that iTunes has provided both Mac and PC users.
Microsoft can easily steal iTunes crown by implementing features that iTunes
has and then some. First thing Microsoft needs to do is make WMP as easy to
use as iTunes in all areas but yet keep WMP unique. I feel that if Microsoft
continues with its open PlaysForSure campaign that would be the way to gain
marketshare back from Apple. Microsoft can say that their WMP and Windows
offers more choice than Apple does. Microsoft can say that WMP supports more
formats, has more features, and is just as easy. This will draw users in and
away from Apple which anyway you look at it is good news for Microsoft. Give
users a media player that they can't live without and make people forget
about Vista. WMP 11 was a huge step forward for WMP. It is on its way to
being on par with iTunes. WMP 12 (or even an update to WMP 11) has the
ability to surpass iTunes in every way. I also think another good strategy
would be to cater to the more advanced digital music user as well by
implementing some features commonly talked about at Hydrogenaudio.org.
iTunes caters to the average Joe while nothing really caters to both the
average Joe and the experience digital music user. WMP can bridge this gap
and be the media player for everyone. WMP 12 could also be the 'killer app'
for Windows Vista. I would encourage Microsoft to still produce a version of
the program to XP users but the Vista version could have some more advanced
features.


Here are my ideas/feature requests for Windows Media Player 12:

Display 'Disc #' as column in library to support multiple disc albums.

Keep multiple disc albums grouped together as one album instead of having an
album per CD.

Make organizing music files easier such as an automatic rename of a file
after a tag change rather than needing to use Apply Media Information Changes
all the time. Look at how iTunes does it, that's the way it should be done.

Give users the option to set no gap between songs on burned audio CDs and
support 700 MB for data CDs.

Make WMP fully compliant with ID3v2.4 tags using UTF-8 (see Foobar2000 as a
fully compatible implementation).

Ability to convert to lower bit rates or between formats.

Support for more audio formats preferrabley inluding MPEG-4 AAC, Ogg Vorbis,
and FLAC.

Think about implementing support for AccurateRip.
This is an easy and free way to ensure that audio rips with WMP are accurate
so people hear less pops and clicks in their music.

Put Internet Radio back into WMP. iTunes has this feature and this was a
great feature in past versions of WMP.

Add a 'Podcast' feature.

Allow users to choose more bit rates for the MP3 format. 96, 128, 160, 192,
224, 256, 320 would be excellent choices. And possibly upgrade the MP3
encoder to use the best MP3 encoder available, LAME.

Improve the options menus and make it easier for people to configure the
player. One example is to put "Error Correction" in the Ripping tab rather
than in the Devices tab.

Improve the Media Sharing feature by making it easier to use.

Improve the auto-playlist feature to make it as easy to use as iTunes Smart
Playlists.

Allow users to make a CD jewel case print out or a print out of albums or
songs in a playlist. Similar to work iTunes does now.


Those are all the ideas I have at the moment. Please post your comments and
feature requests here and perhaps they will be implemented in the next WMP
release.

Hi Tehnilogik,

Thank you for your list of suggestions and ideas. It's a good list, and
quite well thought out. Let me start by saying this: Some of the things
have been considered already, others haven't been. Some are technically
impossible. Some are unable to be implemented due to intellectual property
concerns.

An example of the last is gapless CD burning. The actual technology (and so
licensing there of) belongs to Phillips (read here for a brief overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Boo...o_CD_format%29) and so Microsoft
cannot just implement that.

Another is the LAME MP3 and OGG Vorbis codecs. Just from reading the news,
even I know that no open source or GPL/LGPL software can be shipped with or
within non-open source software, without causing all kinds of legal issues
for the non-open source software company.

Someone has already created a plugin for OGG Vorbis for playback in WMP,
similar to the AAC (m4a) one that came out in Febrary from Orban. Will
someone create a ripping compatible plugin? I don't know, I don't even know
if it's possible to create one that will work with WMP.

BTW, the MP3 encoder that ships with WMP is licenced from Thomson/Fraunhofer.

An example of the technically impossible would be your 700mb of data
request. We can get close to 700mb of data (and we generally do), but there
is file system overhead that must come from somewhere, and add to that the
fact that not all burners and disc manufacturers are equal, you usually end
up with close to 700mb, but not always exactly 700mb of available space. The
math just won't support it. Not even Roxio and Nero get exactly 700mb of
data onto their burns that target 700mb CDs.

The ability to change file names and folder structure already exists, it's
in the Library options (Rename music files using rip music settings) but is
off by default (except on initial rip metadata retrieval) because of a highly
vocal group of audiophiles who demand that their files not be touched until
they say "do it now". That's why the information stays in the library until
the "Apply Media Information Changes" option is selected.

Again, we appreciate your thought and there are some great ideas here, stuff
that we've thought about but discarded because, in all honesty, we didn't
think anyone would really need it, some stuff we never considered at all,
etc. You know the drill.

In addition, here's what I think should be added (some things are small):

1. A wallpaper for WMP in the background that can be customized just like
there is a wallpaper on my iRiver Clix basically.
2. Built-in basic video capture abilities
3. For syncing music, instead of heavily relying on the library to find
your music, also have an option where you can explorer the computer's hard
disks to find the music you're looking for even if they're not in the
library. Similarly, do this with videos and pictures.
4. For the radio feature, show the different "stations" in the playlist
instead of as a web page.
5. An optional feature that can be disabled or enabled that will
automatically sync files to the device when you add them to the sync list
without needing to click the 'start sync' button.
6. On Windows Vista, automatically make window borders very dark when
watching videos, but also, have an option to enable or disable this feature.
7. For Windows Vista, remove mfpmp.exe or drastically improve its CPU
efficiency.
8. For Windows Vista, quit relying heavily on dwm.exe when playing music or
a video.
9. Not sure if it's possible, but have the ability to select your speaker
configuration within WMP itself, and allow you to adjust the left front,
right front, etc.
10. In addition to having the WMP toolbar when minimized, have an option of
instead of a toolbar, it will have a simple play/pause button.
11. Do not enable this by default as this can be CPU intensive, but allow a
feature for visualizations to be partially transparent.
12. Not sure it's possible, but have sound environments under the
'enhancements'.

[Uncle J]

Hi Travis,

Some good ideas there, some that can't be done for technical reasons, etc.

MFPMP.EXE is necessary, it's the decoding engine for audio and video on
Windows Vista. The team that works on that knows that performance
improvements are needed and they're looking at ways to make that happen.

DWM is an integral part of the Vista Premium/Ultimate experience, we cannot
"not" use it if it's turned on. They also know that performance improvements
are needed.

Speaker configuration is a platform setting, WMP is a per user application,
that's why you can adjust volume over all but not each speaker individually
in WMP. This is also why some audio card companies came out with the little
system tray configuation applet so you can do this quickly and easily.

Direct digital video capture of a stream is a content owner copyright issue
that WMP cannot disregard. Isn't going to happen in the player, sorry.

The rest are either great ideas or already being investigated. Thanks for
the ideas!

Hi everyone. I find the comments I have seen here particularly impressive. As a student in Systems Engineering, I am particularly keen to see the ideas of those that use Microsoft software.

Let me start by saying that I am simply Microsoft-mad! I am in everyway, completely infected by the way in which Microsoft does business. For me, every detail is simply spot on and I rarely encounter Microsoft taking shortcuts, contradictory to what anyone else may say.

While searching the web for rumours on Windows Media Player 12, it was therefore particularly fortunate that I stumbled across this thread. My personal thoughts on what has already been said, is that the ideas mentioned are obviously excellent but I would briefly like to focus on something which has crossed my mind over the past few years while the iPod and iTunes have been in existance.

I think that Microsoft should concentrate on a product which they have already created. WMP is more powerful than iTunes in a great number of ways and the problem which Micorsoft has is actually its time in the market. I firmly believe that iTunes is more diluted and easier to use, simply because they have not been working on their player technologies nearly as long as Microsoft has. I imagine that WMP is full of scripts developed maybe several years ago and while perhaps they work and are more than effective enough, time will cause old technologies to fail. I must say that I find the WMA format to be by far, the most advanced media format out there. There is no other format nearly as efficient and effective as WMA and I'll be damned if I have to convert to anything like Real Audio! Mainly, I would like to suggest that Microsoft simply focuses on what is true. An iPod requires that formats are converted to AAC if they are not compatible. WMP offers seamless, simple synchronization and let's not forget, nearly anything which isn't an iPod will be compatible with WMP. As Teqnilogik has already touched upon, just think of all the MP3 players on the market which are cheaper than the iPod and offer support for WMA, a format which will allow users to put twice the amount of music on their media player at a quality which is just as good as an MP3 file with twice the bitrate!

Please do correct me on anything said. After all, what do I know - I'm just a student! :D

[cpow99]

Any chance we will see WMP 12 as a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application? Yahoo! looks like they are doing some great stuff with with WPF

Since everyone does not have the Media Edition of XP or Vista Home Premimum/Ultimate, Microsoft should still at lease make the WMP 12 able to use the Media Remotes. I have Windows Media Center with Vista Ultimate along with a remote. When I play DVDs or Music with WMP 11, I can still use the remote to control the media as if I was using Windows Media Center. So really, when I use the remote control for Windows Media Center or WMP 11, there is no difference since the buttons of the remote does the samethings in both of the programs.

The best thing we could do with WMP 12 is make WMP 11 work with Vista...

I signed up to this forum to make only this one suggestion as it has bothered me for some time. When WMP11 is put into compact mode there is no way to edit the playlist without going back into the full mode. A way to edit playlist while in compact mode like a slide out window would be excellent. This one feature has at times almost made me use winamp for my music.

Oh one thing i'd like to see is the ability to burn Joliet discs under
Vista. My MP3 CD players cannot handle the UDF format. I know it's
possible to burn Joliet discs under Vista...3rd party programs (and my
own code) can do it.

[chaztheman]

I can't predict the future but it's a fair guess that most
applications on Vista will migrate to WPF for their look and feel in
the end.

I've seen some really neat non-public demos in WPF/E too so I wouldn't
be at all surprised if some of that overlaps and puts some new UI
ideas in play.

Note that a lot of the WMP "SKIN" and "BORDER" stuff in the windows
media SDK on MSDN is currently marked as deprecated,which would be the
first step to removal of those legacy features.
When wmp is minimised into its compact toolbar mode the volume is unnecessarily fiddly, see link below:

http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/3...barcopyew3.png

You will also notice a seach button (left hand button below volume control), it would be good if this brought up a quick search feature where you enter the song name and then results (only showing song title) would be shown above, here is another picture:

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/1...rsearchiw4.png


Another thing, when viewing music > songs you cant expand the first coloumn becuase the album art just grows which is really annoying.


This is a great thread, and I appreciate that Microsoft seems to be paying
attention. It is easy to bash MS shortcomings (this isn't the place for my
list, but I do have a long one) but we should all appreciate the things they
do right and especially when they listen.

My #1 request is also to disable auto sync. It is a horrid idea, and badly
done at that. I don't think I could accept it making sense even if you told
me the developers had been at the end of a group bender at the time. It
would be a horrid idea but done better if I could at least disable it
somewhere in the UI. Instead, the only checkbox that seems to do that is
disabled on every machine I use, irrespective of the Windows version or my
user rights / status.

My #2 request would be not to use the Office 2007 colour schemes. Two of
them have almost no contrast (Blue & Silver) and the Black is just
depressing. Perhaps wait until someone is out of therapy before letting them
work on design.

[Sajt]

Hi
1. I am missing the function to open subtitle like in bs player or media player classic. Renameing the subtitles are time which I dont want to waste!
So I use media player classic and bs player (media player classic has sync problem on vista, bs player has bugged subtitle and bad image colors)

2. SSA and ASS subtitle support is needed too!

3. MKV files support missing! :(
MKV is a file which has boundled audio streams and subtitle streams.
All animes are in MKV!
There is a Haali media splitter tray icon where I can set the audio streams and subtitle streams
Unfortunately the subtitle streams are not visible in wmp11 and it does work in BS Player(and the streams can be changed internally in BS player)!

I use mpc11 for hearing music but I can't look movies on it!
If you could add this functions I wouldn't install other players!

Keep up the good work on a perfect media player! ;)
Thx

Agree. I guess I would refer to myself as a "Power User," which is why I
prefer WMP to iTunes, although iTunes does offer a few features that are
helpful. Here are things I would like to see (mostly in no particular order):

1) STOP making WMP resize album art to 200x200. First, I want higher (>/=
600x600) resolution. Second, when pasting album art that is not square (like
from a rectangular Box Set), I am sick and tired of it getting stretched to
square. Please stop the madness. I also want to see larger pictures of the
album (I assume this is tied into resolution). Also see #11.

2) In the Advanced Tag Editor, a field for the "Year." This is the only
common field that is not in the editor. I don't understand why. There is even
a place for it to the right of "Album" and above "Set."

3) Also in the Advanced Tag Editor, a way to indicate a Compilation Album
(similar to the way iTunes does) without it changing the Album Artist to
"Various Artists."

3a) Along with #3, a way that a compilation album will be viewed together. I
know you can change to "Details" view, then sort by album, then change back
to "Expanded Tile," but, come on. How many steps is that?! Plus, if for
instance, you then click on an artist/album, then go back, you have to do it
all over again.

4) Which brings me to my next point. Various Artists. How I hate the term.
For a compilation album, unless you delete the "Album Artist" WMP displays
"Various Artists" as the performer during playback instead of the
"Contributing Artist." I want to know who is actually singing the song.
"Various" tells me nothing.

5) An OPTION to have WMP make media changes immediately instead of having to
click "Apply Media Information Changes."

6) From the "Folder" view, a way to rename/drag & drop music folders within
WMP.

7) In the "List Pane," have WMP automatically diplay the number of songs and
total time without having to stop and highlight everything, but also have the
ttal change if you highlight something.

8) Do something to speed up scrolling through "Album" view. Wow is it slow
(I have a large library).

9) Have a way to jump to a letter in any of the different views (Album or
Artist or Contributing Artist, etc.). This ties back to #8. Trying to see the
albums that start with "M" takes a long time to get to.

10) For multi-disc albums, changing the "Set" box in Advanced Tag Editor,
breaking it down into two boxes (i.e.- Box X of Box Y) similar to iTunes.

11) Some cool way to "flip" the album over to see the backside art or "open"
to the inlay if you happen to have scanned and assigned those particular
items. This would make Cover Flow seem low-tech.

12) Some way to display by "Subgenre". Perhaps give it it's own Icon within
Genre view. I say this because I have a lot of Jazz. I want to keep it all as
Jazz, subdivided by Subgenre (which is the point of a subgenre field). But
for example, there is no quick way to see/play all Smooth Jazz within jazz,
unless I change Smooth Jazz to its own Genre (which I don't want to do) or
make a playlist (which I also don't want to do, because every time I add a
new artist I would have to change the playlist).

Here's a side tip I stumbled across the other day by accident.

The dividers separating each alphabetical section (A... B... C etc) in
the Details view of the Library are broadly useless, and annoy lots of
users - they seem to be there for no apparent reason, adding clutter.

Except - drag the divider bar (containing the start-letter of group of
items) onto the Playlist area. Say, do that from the Artist details
view in the Library.

An instant playlist of all tracks matching that letter.
Same with album titles, genres and so on.



My speciality (both profession and hobby) is building simple websites
for recording data such as this suggestion. I could easily put together
a site where you could nominate your suggestions, or vote for
suggestions by others.

If there's any demand, I could have this going in a few minutes. The
initial users would have to be a little tolerant, as the userid creation
process on my public-facing website is a little primitive (no demand).

Of course, people with multiple email addresses could "stuff the ballot
box" by creating multiple userids on my site, but worse things have
happened.

You don't need to resort to the Advanced Tag Editor: Advanced, yes, but
quick and easy; no. If you have a list (such as the album display) that
shows the track numbers you can edit them in place. Just right click on
one track number and select "Edit". If you are *increasing* track
numbers then I recommend starting with the last track, as it will still
be the last track after you've renumbered it. Once you've typed the new
number, *but before you press "enter"* just press the "up" arrow on your
keyboard. Your edit will be saved, and you'll now be editing the last
but one track. Repeat the process until you get to track 1.

There are all sorts of shortcut tricks like this; you just have to have
been around as long as I have to learn most of them. Someone will
probably now show me how to add 20 to every track number in an album in
one go, without all my painful editing. :-)

I just tried, and you can set a track number of 999, which should cover
everything except "War and Peace" or "The Count of Monte Cristo". So
then the scientist in me wondered what the upper limit is. I tried 1000,
expecting a 3-digit limit, but that was OK. So I changed it to 9000 and
that was OK as well. So enjoy War and Peace in one sitting, from
beginning to end. :-)

When in the album view you can drag one album into another; useful when
merging volumes of a book. You get a popup asking if you want to do it
(yes) and if you want the popup in future. I recommend leaving the popup
set to "yes" otherwise an accidental drag could merge two unrelated
albums, and like mixing wine and water, it is much harder to separate
than it is to merge.

It would be great to have an icon/album art/thumbnail view available for any
sorting of WMP. In other words, instead of always having a view showing
details (more or less, depending on settings) it would be nice to have a view
showing only the album art icons of the selected grouping. This is currently
only possible when 'Albums' is selected. It appears that there may be a
provision for this but that it is not active.

When 'Album' is selected, the different views available are 'Icon', 'Tile',
and 'Details'.
Both 'Tile' and 'Icon' are grayed out or are missing when 'Artist', 'Genre',
or 'Year' are selected. This means there is no easy way to quickly scan the
albums in a selection other than 'Albums'. Scrolling through lists containing
all of the songs in each album is tedious and should be a choice not a
necessity when I'm just looking to scan over all the album choices, say in a
particular genre.

Another nice feature, that is readily available in iTunes (grrr! - I detest
iTunes), would be the possibility to select a group of albums and apply the
same album art to all at once. I have been ripping audiobooks to WMP for use
in my MP3 player and each disc (sometimes as many as 11) has to be set up as
a separate album. It is very tedious to apply the same album art individually
to each disc.

Thanks, Swifty. Actually, I've already used that method for changing the
track names. However, I didn't realize until playing around while writing
this reply that the actual track number could also be changed that way, as
well. You've just saved me an inordinate amount of work. THANKS!!

I've also just seen that, once the track numbers have been changed, the
standard drag and drop technique allows the tracks to be reassigned to any
'album' I choose. It is strange, however, that the '+' symbol displays while
doing so even though it is not making copies; rather they are reassigning the
actual tracks while completely removing them from the album to which they
were previously assigned.

Some audiobooks have 99 tracks per disc. This sure will end up having a lot
of tracks (594 to over 800) assigned to one album once I have finished the
renumbering and moving processes. Again this illustrates why it would be VERY
useful to have a Tile display when looking at any level that shows albums
totally individually. Scrolling past 800 track titles to before seeing the
next album will definitely be tedious.

I want support for multi disc albums. My music has mostly been ripped in
iTunes and I have lots of double CD albums. WMP sees the set Tag but I can't
sort by it so those multi disc albums are playing 2xsong1, 2xsong2, etc. Why
isn't set sortable?

I don't want to split one album into two because that's not the way I want
to listen to them. Unfortunately this limitation is big enough for me to
need to install iTunes on my Vista machine which I was hoping to avoid.

I'll agree with other sentiments mentioned here that this is *some* good
discussion.
That being said, I'd also like to throw in my vote for adding internet radio
back into WMP. Shoutcast playlists/stations are very popular for a reason and
to compete with Wimamp, iTunes, and Realplayer (among others) this is a must.
Although I don't think that the black theme is depressing as Ken mentioned,
I DO think that more options/color schemes would be a good thing. Options are
ALWAYS a good idea as everyone has their own style. Disabling the autosync
would also be nice.
Not sure if it's possible or not, but would it be possible to have multiple
modes for WMP so that you could use it in minimal mode? Not just a minimized
player interface, but have a separate mode for JUST the music player without
all of the other stuff so that system resource util is lessened? Sometimes I
like using the full version and want to switch between multiple types of
media, but other times I JUST want to listen to my music collection without
having much RAM hogged up. For those times, I'd like something like Winamp
2.x without all the other features. Dual-mode WMP 12?
Podcast subscriptions should also be implemented. Outlook can do RSS so WMP should do podcasts.

Same considerations here for this thread. So nice to see such interaction
between the users and Microsoft in this forum. I'm really happy for this.

My name is Edu Camargo "Eh-Doo-Cah-Margu" but you can simply call me "Du" as
in (Doo). I'm blind and I use computers for almost a decade. Once upon atime
we've just expected that media players should play our files without any
delay. Today the concept of having a music library on the computer has taken
a new dimension. I started to think about this one year ago, when I saw
iTunes 7, Winamp 5 and Foobar2000 giving support for gapless playback of
LAME-encoded mp3 files. Today I use WMA lossless for my music. Its
consistence on tagging, interoperability with the programs I have and of
course, having a lossless compression, it's amazing. I can even buy a
Logitech Squeezebox in the future and be sure that I won't be transcoding my
music.

Anyway, I'm having a difaculty on WMP. I don't know if it's something on my
setup or something that should be repaired for the next release.

I have lots of gapless albums in WMAL. Sometimes the gapless occurs
seamlessly on WMP. But there are files where WMP skips some samples at the
end of the file, causing pops/clicks between tracks. I've tested these same
files on Winamp and Foobar, and the files plaied gaplessly 100%.

Also, as an option, I miss the WMP10 library view: All music\Artist\Album
and then enter to play. It's like picking your favorit vinyl record on the
shelf, putting it on the stereo, dropping the niddle and letting the music
flow.

I'm sure that Windows Media Player 12 will fulfill all the expectations of
music fans like us. The so called "digital entertainment" (because CD is also
digital),is in constant evolution and I'm sure that MS won't be far from
this. I'm waiting anxiously for WMP12 and its outstanding new features.

OK : First question - do you *happen* to have a Dell PC ?

If you turn off the gapless for a few minutes, does the popping /
clicking seem to happen consistently a few seconds before the end of
the track (i.e. before the next track begins playback?)

That could point to this long standing and unresolved Dell + Sigmatel
audio card driver bug :


The 2 steps to resolve that are as posted - update sound card driver
software, then disable audio enhancements for Speakers in windows.

As you've noted, this only affects WMP which I believe uses the sound
system rigorously as per-specification.



I believe the reasoning was that doesn't scale to libraries with
thousands of CDs worth of content.

The Search box is very useful in reducing the list rapidly (a few
keystrokes) to a couple of dozen tracks, and worth a try. Also have a
look in the Help, for advanced options of filtering content such as
using genre:blues and so forth.

However I noted during Beta testing that the visual accessibilty of
that (search) field isn't what it could be. I don't remember there
being a hotkey to focus into there, or any real tab order that made it
predictable to reach it with rapid keystrokes.

Out of curiosity (and as an aside), have you tried to use WMP or other
programs with the Vista speech recognition ?

I tried it, and found it incredibly hard to navigate with though
lists, especially in WMP - it appeared to overlay a series of numbers
when saying "Show numbers" as about the only real help.

I've no idea if those track names then are read back by a screen
reader to allow choosing tracks, or even if the screen reader can list
the content directly - what's your experience of that ?

OK so that sounds pretty much up to date for hardware.

The change in WMP11 specifically was that the search focus was changed
from the user having to navigate trees, to searching a media library
[database]

This was done in part, due to the predicted explosion of content users
would have to browse to find a particular track, video, etc.

Naturally (it seems to me, at least), there are far more pieces of
audio content than video content reaily available.

A "typical" user would have many more CDs than DVDs, for example

So the tree based view would become increasingly hard to navigate for
visually oriented users, and I guess what I was asking was "does the
Search" facility in WMP11 work with JAWS, window eyes and the other
software - and does it work well, or just "as well as can be expected
compared to other software" ?

I've seen a demo of JAWS by one of the MVPs who's blind.

He had it reading initially at about 120wpm, but slowed it down for us
dumb sighted MVPs to about 60WPM so we could keep up ;-))

A few of the .NET MVPs were seen reaching for their tablets, to take
notes on how badly their sites were read in a linear fashion, which is
approximately equivalent to how a search engine would view their site
content.

OK so that's a bonus, I wasn't aware it was designed in that way. Glad
to hear somebody was paying attention to user interface design ;-)

I think that's why web developers don't do this optimisation (speaking
as a web developer). JAWS if I remember, came in at several hundred £
GB Pounds.

It's a disincentive to test properly in the more commonly supported
screen readers if it's an optimisation for 1-5% of the market, but
costs around 3x the cost of typical development toolsets.

Sorry, I lost the original thread unfortunately - you'd have to remind
me of the original problem you had, as I can't find it :-(

So the player uses DirectShow under the hood. That makes it prone to
problems in any of the well-behaved drivers but also protects it
against badly written drivers for the harware.

In that regard, if there's some feature provided by the sound card
through its driver software, AFAIK - WMP should pass it through with
any [driver/config level] changes being made, without it being aware
of those modifications to the output.

So for example a lot of people have Karaoke mode on their soundcards,
but ask what to change in WMP to make the singer audio work. The
answer is usually, that it's best to look in the sound card / speaker
config for that, since WMP has no karaoke output feature to modify the
sound.

I'd rather hope that your Soundblaster or USB device, has some feature
like that which can operate independently of WMP's basic decoding of
the audio stream data.

Very many good ideas in here and I agree on Teqnilogik's view on catering for
the advanced users. I'd like an view for advanced users (me) when I set up
the player with the more advanced options, and a view for dummies (my wife
and some friends) just using the player to play music.
(Just like the calculator in the start menu...)

I totally support the need for listening to radio stations.

And then my biggest issues that caused me to stumble over this thread:

1.
I need the possibility to sync with an external harddrive the same way I do
with a device.
This is because I have a HDD in my car with the whole library on, and it is
played by the car stereo. Once in a while I want this to be synced with the
library on the home server. Then I want the HDD to be recognized as a
"device" when it is connected.
So if WMP12 would let you select external HDDs as devices and then put a
file on that HDD so that it later is identified by WMP and synced in the
normal smooth way it would be great.

2.
Libraries and Statistics.
As mentioned above I use Windows Home Server for storing all the media files
(Great solution!). However statistics on ahen, how often etc a song is
played does only show/update on that computer.
If there was an option letting you define where this data is stored and also
letting the user define which of the "databases" to use it would let me have
updated statistics on my desktop to and not different numbers on the desktop,
the laptop and the HTPC.
(Look to ACDSee, they have a good solution on which database you use even
though you use the same library.)

Through many years I have always noted on the back of the covers of my
albums which date I bought them (My wife thinks I'm crazy, but at least I'm
open about it....)
I've tried to use the custom field to register this, but it does only show
on that one computer and for that one user. (Look above.)
Then I've tried to edit the "date added" field but it seems impossible.
I even tried to set the system clock to dates in the earli 90's ant turn off
clock syncronisation, but the date added that comes up is the correct (for me
wrong) date.
3a)This would be solved by giving me the option in suggestion no.2, because
then I could use the custom column to display this information.
3b)It could be solved by adding the column "date bought" but my wife doubts
MS will do that for "one single crazy soul".
3c)Enable users to edit the date added. Most users won't, I will and some
might find other use for it.

And the best suggestions from Teqnilogik I think was:

had many good suggestions to, the top two I think was:

All in all this thread has very many good suggestions I hope to see in WMP12.
But if MS want to keep the advanced users and not loose the "not so
advanced" I think my suggestion in the begining will be important.
("Advanced view" and "Normal Wiev")

Answering to your first question, I have a user-built PC. Mother board Asus
M2N SLI, Athlom X2 4000 and 2gb of RAM. Lately I was dealling with a Sound
Blaster Audigy, but for some reason it stopped responding, so I enabled the
built-in PNP Audio device in order to keep working... And the OS is XP
Service Pack3.

I use JAWS for Windows for any application. I even tested Window Eyes and it
seemed to work pretty fine with the program. Using the tab key I can go
through lots of buttons, trees and lists. JAWS reads all the information and
sometimes more than necessary. It is important to notice that optimized
scripts sometimes are designed to work with some programs that are hard to
navigate. But WMP11 works pretty fine, sounds very clean and the access to
some important features while you, for example, just preview a media content,
is better. Haven't tested the player with the basic built-in Narrator yet.
(By the way, I'd love to see Microsoft implementing a real solution for blind
users, because screen reader softwares are very expensive).

You've talked about turn-off gapless... But I don't use the WMP
enhancements, like volume levelling and crossfade. I listen to the albums as
it is and, as I've reported, there are moments when the gapless playback of
WMAL files on the player occurs without any problem, but there are times when
the player chops some samples. And the first thing I was wondering was
exactly how does WMP deals with the sound driver, and if is there any
possibility of changing parameters.

Sorry for the looooong delay. Things are really crazy in here, thanks God.

Well, here is my original problem reposted below so you are able to recall:

"I have lots of gapless albums in WMAL. Sometimes the gapless occurs
seamlessly on WMP. But there are files where WMP skips some samples at the
end of the file, causing pops/clicks between tracks. I've tested these same
files on Winamp and Foobar2000, and the files plaied gaplessly 100%."

Later, you wrote:

"If you turn off the gapless for a few minutes, does the popping /
clicking seem to happen consistently a few seconds before the end of
the track (i.e. before the next track begins playback?)"

And, as I told you, I don't use enhancements of any kind, because I just
like to listen to music as it is. I just use the "crossfading" feature
ocasionally, but when I listen to albums I turn off all these aditions.

These pops/clicks between some tracks are question of milliseconds. For a
moment I thought it was a WMA encoder's fault, but after playing a gapless
album with Winamp and Foobar2000 and noticing that they've plaied these files
flawlessly... I started thinking, what is causing WMP to act diferently?

Lately I was playing around with a song of mine (I'm an emerging
singer/songwriter)... I was doing a 30seq clip of this song for using as a
ringtone. I used WMA standard. Listening very closely, I noticed that the
file is roughly trimmed before the fade-out is complete. I opened Sound Forge
and made a practical test based on what I listened, and noticed that WMP
ignores something between 5000 and 6000 samples at the end of the file,
something that can be translated into the form hh:mm:ss as about 140
milliseconds being chopped.

And regarding the search field, you asked:

"I noted during Beta testing that the visual accessibilty of
that (search) field isn't what it could be. I don't remember there
being a hotkey to focus into there, or any real tab order that made it
predictable to reach it with rapid keystrokes."

I really can understand, used it for a test, and I found it very easy for us
to use. No delay on reading information, the search edit box is spoken
automatically by JAWS and the results are presented the same way as we see
using the tree. Really, was unable to find something to complain about this
feature. We can access the search field by navigating through the toolbar
with the tab key, or we can just press home to reach the first track on the
list, press the arrow up, and then the search box gains focus.

[egosbar]

i think all players are missing one of the most important and frustrating aspects of a player and that is album art surely there must be an easier way to collect and embed art id like to see a view of a blank cd cover that you can paste art into and it stretches or reduces to fit the window so it looks like a cd then when you add it it would embed the art into the songs

or an option for the player to pick up jpeg images in the folder that the songs are being sourced from and add that image to the art would be a lot easier than the painful steps im taking of embedding art into each song

if there is a site where our suggestions are looked at can someone please copy this and send it

i also like the flip albums i tunes has although i dont like itunes it is a nice feature im not sure though if you can flip when you type a letter to go to that group of albums instead of flipping all the way through but a nice way to look at music more like the old days lol


hope someone reads this that can make these things happen or at least get them to the right eyes im sure whoever gets the jump on album art will be miles ahead of the pack come on wmp do it
.

by the way anyone know when 12 may be ready

one other thing i think in these forums is original post should be displayed followed by the most recent message as we read we may have given more info then some of the previous posts due to the info we have gathered of all ot the posts posted sometimes you read only the first page and miss some important stuff

i guess while im at i might as well add that i like to see the album covers in between 500-600 so they show up big this takes at least 50kb to get a nice view but as i understand it when you sync to a ipod etc it takes up space with high resolution pics even though you only need a thumbnail on a mp3 player can it save them as thumbnails when syncing to a portable player

mmm just started using i tunes wasnt a fan but got an ipod and loaded it so i could load my ipod without the thought of using it as a player although some things are annoying not being able to drag albums into albums as sometimes it puts songs from the same album in a new album same cover

anyway im using itunes now because of the genius feature wow probably one the best ideas ive seen for those that dont know play a song hit the genius button and itunes creates a playlist of up to 100 songs of the same type

with so much mucic it lets you listen to some tunes you wouldnt normally listen or forget very good

Here are a few of my syggestions for WMP 12

1. Make sure that the display is compatible with 120 DPI as well as 96 DPI.
2. Make sure that text descenders in letters g, j, q, and y are never
clipped off.
3. Restore the optional Now-Playing track title display in the main window.
4. Allow synchronous lyrics to be loaded from and saved to text files.
5. Be compatible with windows classic style selection.
6. Allow copy and paste with embedded track art.
7. Allow group delete and group load of all track art.
8. Perhaps allow synchronous multiple image track art (timed slide show).
9. Fix problem of non-automatic display of synchronous lyrics when playing
a playlist.

One more suggestion: Allow for an associated user-defined album-art image to
represent a given collection that may different from any embedded track-art
image. This image would only used to represent that collection as a whole or
serve as a default if no specific track-art were provided.

I normally use the "Album Art" screen display mode with special
high-resolution track-art embedded for each selection.

My wish is to never get this message when attempting to play a legit
rented movie with WMP:

Windows Media Player cannot play this DVD because there is a problem
with digital copy protection between your DVD drive, decoder, and
video card. Try installing an updated driver for your video card.

Years ago on Windows Xp and slow computer I was able to have many WMPlayers
opened at the same time. Many files were loaded, downloaded and ready for
instant access at any time! (for presentation to others). I was able to see
many movies at the same time on small screens, or had a choice which one was
on pause, which one was running etc. - when looking for a specific
fragment-.The sound was independently muted or turned down. , after WMP 7
and up the great programing went back to the beginning of multimedia and
refused to progress, but it started to be called MULTI-media????? It's time
to go with evolution and gave us a CHOICE - not a LIMITATION. There was a
choice in menu if someone likes that option to be enabled.

Media player 6.4 (don't get too misty eyed, it wasn#t great, it was
very limited !)

The technical decision made reflects hardware limitations.

The player uses graphics acceleration to minimise the CPU load.

As formats get larger (eg HD-DVD and BluRay HD sizes) the load would
become increasingly large on the CPU. So the display technique of
using the graphics card 'overlay' was used to accelerate the playback.

However - and AFAIK this is still the case - graphics cards offer only
one overlay surface, so other players (if more than one) cannot use
that acceleration

Using WMP and tagging MP3s, I agree with your suggestions alot.

p.s. I was wondering why; if I select a few sound files in a folder and hit
enter, they don't list in order in the list pane, and I always have to choose
'sort by...title or album' etc.

I am a happy Microsoft user(yes they do exist) running vista(and I like it)
and would like my windows media player to have an option to fit in my
sidebar. I think Microsoft can do that since both products are the property
of Microsoft.