And nor, so it seems, is WinAmp the only reasonable music player on Windows anymore.For a long time I have hated Windows Media Player for a number of reasons:
It has limited codec support
It is clunky and ugly
It has the kind of UI only cryptic crossword and Sudoku fans would find intuitive
It is slow
It doesn't play nicely with media devices
It is made by Microsoft (what?)
And yet and yet and yet... I started playing around with it this afternoon and I made a terrible discovery. In it's latest incarnation (11) it is pretty good. It is sleek. The new styling of it is very "prepare for Vista, bitches" which is no bad thing. Even if Windows is playing catch up to other OSes, making things look nicer is not inappropriate in my mind. The structure of the media libraries is well thought out. It handles album art with panache (although not well enough, quite frankly). It supports music stores (even eMusic, which was a nice surprise). Now that I converted my .oggs into mp3s, codec support is no longer an issue. And then there was the media player support. And this was the bit that hurt the most. It does it better than the Creative software I've been using that came with the Zen. How is that allowed? Granted it doesn't do podcasts (at least I don't think it does, I mean I've not really fiddled with that side of things yet), but the transferring/ syncing side of things is better thought out. And of course, this being a "media player" you can do your videos and pictures, too.
Oh well, maybe Vista won't be a complete cluster-fuck, eh?
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