Recently Sean sent me a link to his blog about portable media players and other cool devices. I immediately told him that I’d have some comments on it but sure enough I not only commented on that I started in on the poor innocent Windows Media Player. I gave him plenty to go on and he asked me to send him an email but I figured my blog was a better medium.

Portable Media Devices, I decided that I’ll never find one that will meet the storage requirements of my vast media library, 100GB+. The Dell would probably be my pick for music players, I’m looking forward to the Portable Media Center we will have to wait and see on that one though.

Knowing that for the time being I’ll never find a 250GB portable media device and wouldn’t want to carry around a desktop hard drive anyhow. I figure the only solution that suits my needs is to get a decent sized device that most easily lets me synchronize my data back and forth as fast as digitally possible (read: USB 2.0). If I copy over 8GB of music I want to listen to for my trip up to Canada to visit Jon and come back with an additional gig of music from his system that I downloaded through my account on Napster, I expect it to synchronize nicely with my Windows Media Library.

I also find the idea of buying a $249+ device that doesn’t support the second most popular audio format on the Internet to be complete idiocy. Frankly I don’t really like any of the players for reasons of audio formats. Why isn’t there one that will play everything? MP3, WMA, AAC, OGG, it’s all the same to my ears.

The center of my media experience at home is the Windows Media Player and the Windows Media Center. The former is really the only way I’d stay half-way sane when trying to organize all my media. Classical music is still a bit of a problem, but for everything else, Microsoft’s data providers, AMG and Muze do a pretty good job of helping WMP identify what I’ve just popped in and what I’m listening to. I still have plenty of issues with it though. I wish user submitted data would be integrated more quickly and even though it probably won’t happen for reasons I won’t get into, I’d like to see GraceNote’s CDDB as another data provider even if there are times it’s less than 100% perfect. Then again neither is AMG or Muze. More on that later.

The latter tool has revolutionized the way I relax and enjoy media, much the same way TiVo users have found their TV viewing experience changed drastically upon getting the device. I too find that I watch less TV and only watch what I’m interested in. I don’t know when The Simpsons or That 70′s Show comes on, and I don’t even know what day MythBusters comes on. It doesn’t matter. I practically never see a commercial anymore, and my archive of favorite episodes is growing as well since I can easily cut out commercials before archiving to DVD+R in .DVR-MS. Hopefully soon that’ll be every episode in WMV format on CDR. Another cool use of media, the 20,000 photos I’ve taken so far with my Canon PowerShot G2 are all on Media Center and when I’m not using the machine I have the pictures going as a slideshow with music playing at the same time. All too often people just take pictures and put them away, what’s the point of that?

While WMP and MCE are great they are nowhere near perfect. One thing I try to remember when making these rants and/or suggestions is that they’re all from my point of view. There are plenty of other people that won’t find any of what I suggest relevant to their needs or what they’re interested in. Anyway, ever since Microsoft allowed us to send in wishes through the MVP Wish page as well as the public WMP and MS Wish methods I’ve been coming up with a few ideas and suggesting the relatively good ones. So Sean, as requested here’s the list:

• I hate to admit it and I hate using it, but WinAmp 2/5 are so much better when it comes to jumping through and listening to all of my music quickly. I use WMP9 to organize and play albums and music from individual artists. But when I want to play all of my music I feel as if I must use WinAmp. I simply tell it to recursively go through my music share on M:\ and load all of the music in the playlist. At this point I hit CTRL+ALT+J which is WinAmp’s global shortcut for Jump. The cursor is already set in the search field so I type in Rolling Stones and instantly the 12,466 songs is narrowed down to only those with “Rolling Stones” somewhere in the file or the file’s pathname. Then I use the arrow keys and go down to “The Rolling Stones – Wild Horses” and hit enter, the song plays immediately. Heck if I wanted to I could cut out one step and just type Wild Horses and hit enter.

  Now lets compare the steps required in WMP to do something very similar. Well, there are a couple of ways of doing this. If you usually use WMP in full mode then you’d go to Media Library and either scroll through the list of 976 artists or you’d click Search. Take your hands off the mouse and type in Rolling Stones. Take a hand off the keyboard and click Find Now then go back to using the mouse again. Scroll through the list of songs and then double click Wild Horses. So that right there proves WinAmp is much easier to use, I never take my hands off the keyboard when I use it.

  There is one cool feature of WMP9 that allows you to minimize to the Task Bar, this used to be done by using a Power Toy written by Zach. Unfortunately moving through music isn’t any easier this way, if anything it’s harder than granite. You click this little down chevron and go to Artists (there is no Songs, which would be dumb anyway) then you start to move through the 976 artists, unfortunately R is pretty deep in the list so you keep moving your mouse back and forth over to More to pop up the next set of Artists. Care to guess how many times I had to do this before getting to Rolling Stones? Try 13! What if I wanted to play my Zero 7? That takes 18 hovers over More. Oh I’m sorry did I say 18? I meant 36 because the first time I accidentally moved the mouse a bit too far and had to start over. It’s worse when trying to do this through the list of Albums because the menu tends to be wider and you have more mouse travel over the screen as the menus don’t pop up back and forth. But yes, after 13 menus you get to listen to all off your Rolling Stones even though you only wanted to listen to Wild Horses.

  If it were me, in the Task Bar mode I’d basically change that chevron menu and create a new dialog and a new global shortcut (CTRL+ALT+F maybe, or  [thanks Dom for the reminder, even though “global 'and windows' shortcuts is a big no-no“]… a Windows key shortcut, or a LH Sidebar tile, maybe even one of the multimedia keys on the MS Keyboards). Remove Albums and Artists from the chevron menu and replace it with Find Media. So you either hit the global shortcut or click the menu but a dialog comes up that lets you go through your media the same way the WinAmp Jump feature does only this has been enhanced and made far superior by Microsoft. On the first tab we’ve got the search field ready selected and below it we have everything in columns so you can see the artist, album, and song title as WMP narrows down the Local Media. Surely there’s going to be more than one file with “Horses” in it. Heck maybe even let us customize the columns in there. On the next tab we’ve got search functions for Internet Media, basically this lets you look up online radio stations and other media ala windowsmedia.com and the Find Media button in Now Playing. The key to actually making this useful is speed and accurate results. Local Media must be returned as quickly as AutoComplete items are returned when typing in the search field. I should be able to type in artist, album, or song title and have the right results. What would be really cool would be some IntelliSense, type in “[track] 6 on Dark Side” and hit enter then WMP plays Money. The main thing is just making it really easy to jump quickly from one item to another with the least amount of interruption in work flow. Moving my hands back and forth from the keyboard is not an option. I think that covers that feature well enough. If I could pick one feature to include in WMP10 it would be this one. Not just because it’s the only reason why I install WinAmp but also because I think it would require a change forcing the Windows Media Library in general to be much quicker. Who knows, maybe everything will actually be fixed in Longhorn.
   

• All Music Progressive Shuffling, I haven’t a clue what to call it so never mind that. The concept behind the idea is pretty simple. John Eddy was telling me that he just plays his music through WMP using All Music. I said that was great and all but it’s not intelligent. The music doesn’t flow in genre or style and that’s one reason why I have to use jump in WinAmp. The concept is pretty simple, it’s even being done by Microsoft already on MSN Music it’s called SoundsLike, they use “18 different criteria” to match music. When you view an artist on MSN Music, say CSNY, at the bottom of the artist or album page you’ll see SoundsLike Artists. These are artists that MSN thinks I’ll like based on the fact it’s similar to CSNY. While I can’t say it’s been 100% accurate in guessing my true musical tastes it’s certainly not jumping from Led Zeppelin to Britney Spears to Dvorak. Therein lies my problem with the All Music and Shuffle feature in both WMP and WinAmp for that matter. If you just want to hit play and have all your music go through randomly but in a progressive listening style that’s not really possible. Yes we do have the Auto Playlists including the playlists by decade, they are pretty nice, they still don’t play music progressively. I’ll touch on another feature request with Auto Playlists in a moment.

  Another example of the idea of linking music is a site that’s been getting around a lot lately, it’s called Musicplasma. It takes music genres and the artists and sort of gives it that three degrees of separation feel to finding new music. I’d really like to thank the people behind this one. For me it’s a great way to finding more music that I’d be into that I might not ordinarily now about. I’ve got loads of music in every genre out there. I’ve often said it would be great if I could find more music that sounded like, for example, Robert Miles, well, Musicplasma and SoundsLike allows me do that.

  Why can’t my Shuffling in WMP be intelligent like that when I want? Well I think it can, if Microsoft builds it that way. Two immediate problems though, first is the one I touched on earlier. Microsoft doesn’t say what music is what, it’s data providers do. For the most part they give good information. The results start breaking down when it comes to music genres. AMG for example just loves putting everything under the sun into the rock genre. This is probably the main factor that limits us from having smart music shuffling. If WMP can only go on the data provided by AMG and Muze to know how to go from Coltrane to Miles Davis not Coltrane to the Foo Fighters, it’s going to fail.

  The same problem with data continues in that there often isn’t enough of it coming from the providers. This data shouldn’t be left to the user to input manually as that just ruins the user experience. WMP has plenty of other ways for getting a feel for music, take a look at the Advanced Tag Editor and you’ll see Genre, Style, Mood, a field for the beats per minute, and even what key the song is in, what else would it need?
   

• Back to the Auto Playlists quickly then onto a couple small “quirks” in the Media Library. I’m not sure if this is what you meant Sean by Auto Playlist Sync support, but I’ll go ahead anyway. So I went on that hypothetical trip to Canada and brought 10GB of totally random music. It turns out that for most of the flight I actually listened to Styx (scary thought). I also adjusted the rating on some of my music and decided that Supertramp really did get me in the right mood for traveling. I get back home from the land of the maple and plug my device back in, I expect all of my meta changes and listening stats to be synchronized back into the Media Library.

• WMP’s Media Library is by far the best media library available in a media player. There is MusicMatch, downside to that player is the $19.99 price tag, you can however spend $39.99 and get every future version but still I’m not ready to pay for something that I can get for free. WinAmp also has a media library which puts up a good fight but I find it to have a slightly less panache than the others. I won’t even touch Real’s droppings because it totally invades my system. iTunes/QuickTime is great and all but it’s Apple, I don’t even consider it to be at the same level or same category as WMP… So, having tried all of competitors I can safely say I like WMP’s media library best.

  I have some major problems with its automatic media information updating though. Don’t get me wrong, when popping in a CD for the first time then going to rip it, it’s nearly flawless, exception being classical music (maybe because of AMG Classical’s data). If you download music (without getting into whether it’s legally or illegally) or if you’re adding music ripped to MP3 by another app then you’re results start going south like a duck in winter. Yes, that’s exaggerating, it’s really okay, but is okay good enough? My biggest gripe with the media library would have to be inconsistent results. Sometimes it’ll find albums automagically when adding the media in without me doing a thing, that’s the way it should be.

  Sometimes I have to use Find Album Info for the first two or three tracks and it figures it out. Most of the time I have to use Find Album Info for every track, if it would work the way I’d expect it to, it wouldn’t be a problem. Find Album Info is usually the only method that will work when an album has multiple versions. For example one with explicit lyrics, one without, one with bonus tracks, one without, a [UK] version and one for the states, compilation CD’s, and my favorite, the multi disc albums. Mix and match all those variations and it’s easy to understand why WMP has a hard time occasionally.

  There are some nifty ways of figuring out what’s what though. CD’s like just about everything else on this planet have unique id’s. That’s the first method that WMP uses to know that the CD you just popped in is the Best of the Doors [2000/Enhanced] Disc 1 not Disc 2. When you rip your media to WMA it embeds a WMID into the file that marks as being apart of that album. Unless you use the SDK or another tool, there’s no way to change this in WMP. The other method that can be used are to search based on total disc and individual track times. For finding media information from MP3′s and untagged WMA’s it can use the file name for a start. So many people will use something like The Doors – Riders on the Storm.mp3. It’s then up to you to tell WMP which album it’s from. This is this gray area where you enter the twilight zone and the laws of SQL physics don’t apply. But for most of the media out there WMP should have the data to go with it. Unless the data hasn’t been provided yet by AMG or Muze the best thing to do is try and adjust your search. You have to maybe remove the album title or maybe give it an album title but no artist, or the best way to return amusing results, adjust the song title and play with the former two adjustments (this and of itself is a great way to discover new music ).

  As if I wasn’t ranting yet it only gets better. I’ll use an example that I’ve provided Microsoft before, just for fun… First, if you were to pop in a CD and WMP couldn’t immediately recognize it you’d go through the album information search wizard. First you’d search for Led Zeppelin then on the next page you’d click the exact match, Led Zeppelin (Rock : 96 Albums). Somewhere in that list you find what you’re looking for and click How the West Was Won [3 Albums] (Atlantic : 2003-05-27) then click for Disc 1. Normally the page would look like this and clicking Finish would match that album information with the CD. Here’s an Album Information page that WMP shows normally when it has successfully found the track information. Now clearly I’ve made my point that it has all of the meta data for Zeppelin’s How the West Was Won. Why is it that I can import the 3 disc album as WMA, enter in all of the meta information that I can as the Album Information and CD Wizard page provides it, do a search for exactly the same information using Find Album Information and get 0 results? Mind you I finally managed to get Disc 2 found, but the other two are still waiting in my queue. Heck, I’ve even go the WMID that WMP would put into the tracks for disc one and three and from what I’ve tested, WMP would find the album information if I popped the ID into the files, there is no way to do this though in WMP’s Advanced Tag Editor. If there was, I’d only have to insert the WMID and click Update Album Info to force it to associate correctly. I first noticed this when my CD of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A was changed to Ladies & Gentlemen, The Best of George Michael because I had manually entered the track information and WMP didn’t already have a WMID for the Mozart CD.

  Does Microsoft really think it can beat Google at searching when it can’t even find results for something when I give it exactly what’s supposedly in it’s database? Build it and they will come! If the Find Album Information in WMP weren’t so overly precise I’d imagine this issue would go away. When returning results provide every results for albums matching How the West Was Won. If I provide WMP with all of the required information it better damn well find it.
   

• While on the topic of meta data, WMP allows you to automatically update media information and location of files. I personally use it to overwrite existing information so it best matches what’s in the Windows Media Meta Services. I also let it add information to media that was copied with another program and best of all, I let it rename and rearrange music using the media information. Normally this works beautifully, it saves me time by not having to add the information to the files and not having to move the files into the correct directories and adjust files using my naming scheme. My only problem with it is that if WMP decides that my Mozart isn’t really Mozart instead it’s George Michael, when I go to look for Mozart in My Music folder I’ll have a hard time finding it. My suggestion would be to just add a simple dialog when WMP decides to automatically move media from one folder to another. Just let us confirm the new directory and if necessary change it. Have a yes to all and no to all button as well. I don’t think a confirmation is really needed when renaming files that stay in the same folder, only when moving them from one location to another. Because there was no confirmation I would’ve never realized that my media was moved unless I happened to notice it in the Media Library.
   
• One more thing about the data as well. It’s a very minor issue, and most users in the US would never notice it. It’s not really Microsoft’s fault either as far as I can tell but I’m sure they could use their weight just a bit to help the data providers shift over a bit. A lot of the album information is regional based. If I’ve popped in Elton John’s Greatest Hits 1970-2002 that I’ve bought in the US, I’ll get all the wonderful album information, including the album art and review as well as the track listing. If I had purchased the album in the UK (which I did), I get nothing in the View Album Info area. Just the message “No additional information was available for the selected media”. I’m not asking for a completely different set of information for each world wide album release because I realize that’s just not possible. But at least provide whatever information is shared between the album. Even adding a sentence saying “… Click here to view other similar albums by this artist.” If the album art is the same for both US and UK version then they both should be using it, not the default music note and frames of film. Similarly, if I’ve provided WMP with a multi disc album, when I click on any of the tracks from any one of the album discs the view album information should show up for all of the discs not just the first as it is now.
   
• I asked Ray Dixon what he’d like to see changed in WMP. He reminded me once again of the second reason why I still use WinAmp. It needs to “take up fewer resources and manage the ones it uses better”.  Even though it has improved drastically over WMP8, “right now [in WMP9], it’s a freakin’ PIG sometimes – especially when using it with plug-ins and add-ons”. Why is it that even when I import my entire media library into WinAmp, iTunes, or RealOne, any of those players can instantly pull up its library and immediately narrow down what I’m looking for but WMP does it in half the time? Ray also said that developing plug-ins for WMP needs to have a better framework and be much easier to write for so we can create good ones that don’t steal valuable system resources.  There’s already plenty of good information available for developers through WMPlugins.com and MSDN. It just doesn’t feel as if there’s as much weight behind the WM SDK’s as there is with say the DirectX SDK. Oh and why is it that WMP kills all of my plug-ins if one caused it not to shut down correctly? Change the way plug-ins work so that I can just kill the nasty one not the entire lot.
   
• Ray also brought up codec management which is something I totally forgot about since I usually use a third party tool to view what codecs I’ve got installed and what codecs are needed for any particular media file. As Zach points out on his WMP support page (see questions 4, 5 and 7…), a problem with media playback sometimes stems from bad third party and hacked codecs. WMP should allow us to better manage the codecs and restore all of the certified Microsoft provided codecs to their default settings. A single page would be nice to provide a list of all known reliable and supported codecs available for installation. Maybe just add a codecs section under WMPlugins.com, I shouldn’t have to use a third party tool to figure out what codec is needed, Google for multiple versions and releases of a codec and try each one out crossing my fingers it doesn’t cause some collateral damage.
   
• While improving the codec management, we could also use better error messages, it’s just a sad state when errors and their error codes need a KB article to not only explain the error but explain the error code as well. Zach does a good job of answering questions regarding various errors. Why not provide a real plain english explanation for the error, the error code, and a link to a proper entry in the Help system for more information about the error? Can Microsoft really expect the average user to know what “No Combination of Filters Could Be Found to Render the Stream” means? After talking to John Eddy (another MVP Lead), he asked on Messenger why might the windowsmedia.player group have so many 0 and 1 line posts with so many coming from the webnews interface. I guess I’ve gotten so used to the posts like that, I stopped noticing why. I can safely say that every single post that is 2 lines or less has the error code in the subject line or one one of those 2 lines. What does that say? It says that the user probably thinks the error is so obscure or unique that surely by just giving the error message we (as MVP’s and helping individuals) should be able to give them their exact answer. Post after post repeat like a broken record:
  • Subject: error 0xC00D11BA
    any ideas would be appreciated
  • Subject: 80040154
    HELP, it wont play video from the web?????
  • Subject: code error
    anyone know how to fix this error C00D2845. Thanks in advanced

  This says to me that the error messages and support information provided with the WMP is totally inadequate. Error messages need to first provide a clear description of what’s going on and why, and where to find more information. Then via an Advanced button or whatever provide the exact diagnostic error message and error code.

This rant/suggestion/love/hate for WMP has certainly gotten longer than I was originally expecting it to be. It does seem quite long but realistically we’re only talking about roughly a dozen key issues with WMP right now. That’s nothing compared to the competition. I wouldn’t want to even start on the shortcomings of WinAmp, MusicMatch or Real. To summarize these issues again in far fewer words…

1. Quicker Access to Media via a “J”ump feature similar to WinAmp’s.
2. All Music Progressive Shuffling.
3. Auto Playlist and Meta Data / Media Library Synchronizing.
4. Finding and Updating Meta Data for Media in the Library.
5. Ask to confirm when automatically moving files based on Meta Data.
6. More consistent experience when viewing album information.
7. Still continue improving WMP’s resource utilization.
8. Make plug-in development even easier.
9. Provide some form of codec management and information.
10. Provide plain english error messages and resolutions.

If the SDE’s working on WMP and Longhorn really have been given a carte blanche then anything should be possible. Scoble and other softies have said repeatedly that they’re giving us so much information so early so they really can make a difference in the final product. In the past good beta testers and MVP’s have been fed this idea before but it usually never went any further than a response of “that’s an interesting idea, ping me and I’ll follow up on it”. I think for the most part they really mean it this time, it shows in their blogs and it certainly shows on MSDN and other community sites. Many skeptical supporters are starting to believe it as well. I feel that if Microsoft is going to start cooking the eggs it’s our job to keep the heat under their pan and if they screw up let them have it. That being the case I will be severely disappointed if we don’t get at least one or two of these suggestions into the next WMP in some form or fashion. If anyone has some other great ideas for the player please comment or email me. The time to blast the speakers is now!

Tags: Ideas, Longhorn, Media, Microsoft, Music, Rants