Summary: ProductFeedback about WindowsMediaPlayer@Wikipedia

This was inspired by the thread How should Media Player be improved?#3802
Note that Windows Media Player 10 has been released - please check whether WMP10 already implements your suggestion.

Fix bugs

Yea thats a little bland what what I mean is we really never see updates to the media player or other than 8,9,10 what about a mid version say 10.5. The current way of just putting out major updates is bad because every version overhaluls the interface so you have to relearn it. Also when you put out patches like the updates for drm and security handeling or the addition of DX acceleration for MP 10 (should have appearad way back in like 8) should be delivered through the built in updater instead of Microsoft/Windows update.

Feedback

Add a "Submit Feedback" link to the Help menu, like in Office, for example.

Need to be able to rewind music

WMP lacks an ability that every other music playback device I've owned for 15 years (cassette, CD, DVD, and other software music players) has had: the ability to rewind within a song in the same way that you can fast forward within one. This surprising omission is really painful when controlling WMP with a remote control (as in MCE) -- if you want to rewind just 5 or 10 seconds, your only option is to skip all the way back to the beginning of the track and listen to the entire track again from the beginning. I just downloaded the WMP 11 beta and was disappointed to find that rewinding music still seems impossible with this new release. (Strangely, rewinding a video clip has been possible since WMP 9 or before.)

AAC/AVC, VP6/VP7 and OGG support.

Support for MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding, Advanced Video Coding and Ogg Vorbis audio files.

Please add support for VP6/VP7 video files. It's the highest compression video codec currently available.

Device Support

Support for the Sony NetMD. Love the player and easy to work with, but the included software with the device is not optimized.

I agree with you. I think Sony would have to drive this, though, by plugging in to WMP's interfaces, and offer some form of translation from copy-protected WMA to their own OpenMG format and ATRAC3/ATRAC3plus encodings. The supplied software offers translation from unprotected WMA only.

Directory Watching

So you're busy downloading some legal mp3's or something, and you load up the partial downloaded album into WMP and it shows 5 out of the current 10 songs you're getting from i dunno itunes or napster. So you're playing through your 5 songs and youve downloaded 2 others into the same directory, but to get them in the playlist you have to reload the dir, what a pain, now imagine if WMP could watch the directory so that any files are automatically added to the playlist as soon as theyre put in the directory. Great! Stemming from that idea, if i change the filename, WMP should automatically see this and make provisions so the dir doesn't need to be reloaded to accomadate the filename change. -- Jaz

- This feature already exists. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe it hooks into NTFS to do this. Do you have a FAT drive or a pre-2000/XP OS? Works perfectly for me here - ShadowChaser

Error Messages

More helpful error messages.

Feedback on Album Information

The Album information databases are almost invariably wrong. Most albums come out as "rock" (whether it is or not). Provide a mechanism to give feedback on mistakes in the database? It's also very frustrating when I will rename the tracks / music types to what they should be, only to have it reset them to what it thinks is correct. - ShadowChaser

Format Support

Why should we install a load of media players just to play different formats?

A rich codecs collection supporting most formats for playback and ripping preferably available also through Windows Update. Support for more formats should include MP2, MP4, Quicktime, Real Audio/Video, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, DivX, XviD, FLAC, etc. This support should come with the OS itself. (Real Player 10 supports all those formats already and even more). MOV playback would be great. Icecast/Shoutcast support by default.

Downloading and installing different codecs should be made seemless and without errors. (Supporting more formats will not harm WMA/WMV but will instead make users happy for the seemless experience and give them choice.) A codecs organizer should be included showing codecs names, versions, file types supported, etc and allowing codecs more customization. (Like the IE Addon Manager in XP SP2).

The media player should be able to check what DirectShow codecs are installed and allow the user to add files to the library based on what it found or the user should be allowed to tell WMP what extensions to look for when adding media files. For example, I have an OGG DirectShow filter that allows me to play those files just fine in WMP10 and Media Player Classic; however, I can't add them to the library. I'd like to be able to specify, or have WMP find on its own, what new files can be added so that I can add OGG and ACC files to the library.

Hardware Acceleration in the WMV9 VCM Codec

Nvidia put a video processor into their GeForce 6 and 7 graphics chips that allows it to hardware accelerate WMV encodes. It would be nice if the WMV9 VCM Codec was updated to take advantage of this.

Importing User Ratings

I've got countless hours invested in tagging my MP3s with user ratings in MusicMatch ("excellent", "very good" etc. which correspond to star ratings in Media Player). Because of the lack of a good standard ID3 tag for user preference ratings, MusicMatch implements this as a custom text tag in each file and Media Player (from what I've gathered) implements this with a separate database outside of the tags. To get me and other users to switch to media player, it would be useful to have an option to import user preference tags from Musicmatch and other jukebox software programs.

Kar/Midi support.

Support for Midi format .Kar Karaoke and .Mid files with Lyrics. Include displaying Lyrics.

Enable Visualisations for Midi format files.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Simpler and customizable keyboard shortcuts. (like in Winamp v2).

* Framestepping with keyboard (each cursor keypress moves one frame when video paused). It would be good if shortcut keys were customizable as well. -- sbc
* Play/pause with the spacebar.
* Fast forward / rewind with the cursors.
* Fast forward / rewind by using the mouse wheel.
* Directly jump to a particular song in your playlist by entering the first letters of its name and pressing enter.
* Ability to seek (jump) to a specific time in a song/video. (Like in Real Player pressing ctrl+e and then entering a time).
* Ability to fade-out the current song by a keypress.
* Support controlling playback and other features like equalizer by the keyboard.

Media Library

* Indexed media library for real-time "find-it-as-you-type" searches, viz. iTunes.
* Ability to rollback changes to the library database in the event of inadvertant media acquisition via search (i.e. "Oops! I shouldn't have added all Microsoft Money sound effects to my library.").
* Ability to backup media library, preserving all non-file-based attributes like Rating and Acquisition Time.
* Sharing of the media library through the network and by other programs.
* Media Guide should have better content and should not include any pop up advertisements.
* Rather than just allowing you to associate a single genre with a song, allow the user to associate user-defined Tags or Keywords with a song, similar to what Digital Image Suite 10 does with photos. For example, tag songs with keywords like "Female Vocalist", "Progressive Rock", "Hard rock", etc., so that a single song might have many keywords. This is much more flexible than a simple genre.
* Open up the My TV section. I have several DVDs of TV episodes. I'd like to be able to rip and encode them, and then have them show up under My TV, rather than My Videos.
* Advanced tag editor for Videos shows input boxes that really only apply to Music. The Advanced Tag Editor for Music, Videos, TV, and Pictures should all be different.
* Allow for the user to specify a sort priority, such as letting the user say "sort by Artist first, then by Album, then by Track number" or the user could tell WMP to sort by Song title first, then Artist, and so on. These settings should be saved so that they remain the same when WMP is closed and started later.
* Pre-set equalizer settings for each song (like in iTunes).

Mini-player

(A Media Player 10 feature: resizing the player window smaller than a certain size switches it into a smaller mode showing only the player controls and a spectrum analyzer graphic).

The mini-player view doesn't offer the Quick Access Panel: the only way to select a different album is to switch to a different view or resize the window (maximize is quickest).

The tooltips shown for the controls are wrong:
* "Stop" shows "Watch what's currently playing"
* Some areas of the volume control show "Rip music from audio CDs"
* Hovering over the title bar shows "Seek"
* The area between the volume control and the spectrum analyzer shows "Burn files to CDs"

The last two are intermittent.

More Polishing

I believe that Media Player 10 needs to polished. This program crashes constantly. I have submitted error reports whenever possible (I have dial up at home) and have never seen a reply as to why it crashes.

Also will the download on http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/mp10/default.aspx then click to download it be updated. There have been updates to the program for some DRM stuff and to fix visualization acceleration thru DirectX which has been an issue since like Version 8. I would like to see these fixes put into the main download so I dont have to find them. Also those downloads should come up in the built in updater or in Windows/Microsoft Update instead of having to search through the KB articals.

OS Support

* Make it work on Windows 2000. -- PaulMorriss
* Uninstall support: If you can install it you can uninstall it too. If I need a computer that doesn't need multimedia capabilities, I shouldn't be forced to have any version of Mediaplayer on it. -- ZippyV

Playback

Ability to pause the current item, play something else and then continue with the one previously paused, like you can do with the old tapes.

Other background processes should not affect playback quality.

Playlists

* I use WMP every day, all day, and there are only 2 things that I feel really need improvement. 1 is to remember the Now Playing playlist automatically including when the app is shutdown and restarted. 2 (should be in the next heading) is that the ID3 tags should ALWAYS and WITHOUT FAIL update when using the Advanced Tag Editor (and the inline edit in the list).
* Printing of playlists should be supported.
* Better randomization of songs.
* A way of marking some songs as "Archive" or "Offline" or something, so that they don't show up in regular searches. For example, I have a large collection of comedy like Dr. Demento's music and whatnot, and usually, I don't care about this stuff, it's just there for when I want it.. I want it to show up in searches, but when I'm looking for "Unrated Music", I don't want to see this stuff. Another example is seasonal music - I don't want my Christmas music showing up in my June playlists.
* Dynamic playlists based on percentages of different search categories: e.g. Automatically generate a playlist consisting of 70% Rock, 20% Pop, 10% Blues.
* Master view of songs with playlist inclusion (e.g. to support answering the question, "What playlists is SongX on?"). This will assist in creation of playlists with mutually-exclusive content, or identifying songs that aren't yet on any playlists.
* Sort and shuffle playlist order.
* Ability to include music from a specific folder (and an option to include sub-folders or not) in Auto Playlists, for people who have their music categorised into folders. I can't find any way to do this at the moment.

Purchased Music

* It would be nice to be able to select a Purchased Music list just as I select an album or playlist, ie in Mini-mode. --Neotom

Random Play should be Random

Random play ( in all WMP versions) isnt very random. i have thousands of songs yet i still seem to end up listening to the same ones. A shuffle button a la iTunes would be good. --Adamfield

Radio Tuner

Radio Tuner should not use an html based gui since it is slow and should not popup any extra IE windows containing unnecessary station pages.

A radio tuner only? why not a tv tuner too?

Recording

Recording from line-in, so that we can record our tapes from a single program and compress them by any codecs we like!

Recording from streaming audio/video should also be supported.

Rights Management Improvements

Licensed content never seems to work quite right, from burning problems to being repeatedly prompted for the license, to other glitches that cost money.

DRM must be absolutely solid to be an enabling technology, and not a pain in the bum. At the moment, it is more of a pain in the bum.

DRM Delay: Playing DRM protected music in both WMP and various devices carries a 3 second or so delay. Can't the license be cached or something like that? All I know is, iTunes plays their protected music instantly, while I have to wait. In fact, the delay is one of the only reasons I choose not to use a subscription based music service.

Rip at the Right Bitrate

When using VBR in WMP10, the program setting doesn't match the output. For example, I just ripped the Norah Jones "Feels Like Home" CD using a VBR range of 85 to 145. But the songs register anywhere from 129 (which is actually the only time I've had a song register anywhere within the correct range) to 198. I'm getting the following: 176, 174, 168, 189 and so on. When using VBR, I have to set it to rip one level below the actual results I want to get. In order to get in the 85 to 145 range I would have to set it to rip at 50 to 95. I've had someone else check it on a different machine and they came up with the same results. -- trajj

Ripping

Ripping to wav should be supported. (many sound editing programs still support only wav).

Ripping to other formats like MP3 should be supported. Cost is not an excuse. Other free ripping software can rip to other formats like MP3 and AAC.
Answer: Windows Media Player 10 does this.

Ripping should not make the computer unavailable for other tasks
Answer: Check your CD/DVD drive's IDE channel's I/O settings in Device Manager (on the Advanced Setting tab). Transfer Mode should read DMA if available, not PIO Only, and Current Transfer Mode something like Ultra DMA Mode 2. Windows 2000 doesn't report mode, just Ultra DMA. If it doesn't, change to DMA if available; if that doesn't help, get a new CD drive. Also, make sure you're using digital extraction in WMP's Devices tab.

I have WMP configured to eject the CD after ripping, and often listen to the CD while ripping. Ejecting the CD should not stop the music - it should continue playing from the ripped files.

It's not possible to rip CDs and listen at the same time, because once a CD has been read, WMP10 doesn't want to know about any other CD. No amount of clicking, refreshing, putting CDs in and out or any other fiddling will convince it that you're ready to rip a second CD. You have to close WMP, which of course means there's not a lot of point listening to music while you rip. I'm surprised no one else has complained about this, really.

Sync

* I'm messing with WMP10 Beta and my new Dell Axim X30, deciding what size SD card to get to use the Dell as a portable media player. I was trying to find a decent compromise between size and quality, so I started at the bottom end - 64kbps - using a test track (Chords of Life, from Joe Satriani's Strange Beautiful Music). This wasn't too good, so I bumped it up to the next level, 128kbps. I was very surprised that it copied again at the same rate.
* WMP stores converted files in "%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player\Transcoded Files Cache" by default. It appears this cache isn't invalidated if you change the sync options. It should be. Choosing Tools > Options > Devices > Advanced > Delete Files forces the files to be reconverted.
* Allow WMP10 to convert DRM protected music! I can't believe that MSN Music gives you audio at 160Kbps, but provides NO means of taking that down when it comes to syncing with devices. I have a 512MB mini-SD card for my smartphone, and keeping the audio at 160Kbps means I lose 5-10 potential hours of music (if I converted it to 128Kbps and 64Kbps respectively).
* Add an new setting to the auto-playlist option box. When you choose "And also include", there should be an option to "also include" a static or auto-playlist. For example, I have an auto-playlist that I sync to my Smartphone, which only has a 512MB Mini-SD card. The auto-playlist should first sync the pictures and video files from the static playlists I have "also included", and then sync music files. The auto-playlist has a size limit of about 490MB, so what should happen is the static set of video and picture files should sync to my phone, and whatever space is left will be reserved for music (which I have sorted by auto-rating).
---> Autosync works in the order that the playlists are in the sync profile. So to accomplish what you want, just put the static playlists separately in your sync profile for the SD card, and the autoplaylist afterwards. The device will be filled in the order of the sync playlists, removing lower priority content to make room for newer higher priority content in the future. You don't have to cram it all into a single autoplaylist.
* I also think it would be a good idea to provide more bitrate options when syncing. As it is now, you can convert files to 64, 128, 160, and 192 kbps. I'd like to see at least a setting for 96 kbps. I have a Rio Nitrus (1.5 GB), and most of the time I set WMP10 to sync at 128 kbps. I have quite a few songs that I'd be comfortable listening to at 96 kbps, but not at 64 kbps. That's just too low. I could still save quite a bit of space without giving up quite as much quality at 96 kbps. -- trajj
* I've only purchased a couple of songs online and I hadn't noticed that protected WMA files can't be converted to a different bitrate. But I have to admit that this fact makes MSN Music much less appealing to me. I liked the idea that MSN Music was going to offer music at a higher bitrate than Napster and other services, but not if the songs can't be converted. The one song I bought from MSN Music is 160 VBR, but at times it shows up as 320 kbps on WMP10. It's a huge file! If I can't convert files like this to 128 kbps, I think I'd rather purchase them from another service at 128 kbps to begin with.

SDK

* Enhance the SDK to include equalizer control through the player object model for embedded players (either in a web page or different application).

* More and richer free plugins. (Winamp has a richer set of plugins for accomplishing a wide variety of tasks).

* .NET SDK via a Managed Library Wrapper.

* For the love of options, please add the ability to change the output device (sound card) per instance. This is somewhat a UI accessible option, so why not make it available to developers?

Startup

* Shorter startup time.
* WMP9 should not load in the Media Guide at startup by default.
* You can turn this off in the latest version - go to options, general, uncheck "start in media guide" - ShadowChaser
* It should be off by default - Nektar.
* Ability to run multible instances of the Player like in v6.4.

Tagging

Moving things around in the Library view should apply the changes to the files' tags as well. Advanced Tag Editor is too slow and painful compared to just dragging some files into a specified genre, album, artist, etc.

Taskbar Toolbar

(The WMP control toolbar on the Start button Taskbar)
* Ability for it to display horizontally even if the Taskbar is Vertical (ie: attached to the left or right of the screen as opposed to the bottom). Of course this would only be possible if the Taskbar was wide enough for it to fit. When it is, this doesn't happen and a huge amount of space is wasted that could be accommodated by more Applications. --peterm

TURN UP THE VOLUME! YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!

Currently the maximum volume for volume leveling is far below the standard volume of WMP. I have volume leveling so every song's as loud as every other song, not because I want to truncate its natural volume peaks. I want it so loud the windows shatter. Maybe have a volume slider for volume leveling with a "Reasonable" notch on it, then a Spinal Tap-esque "11" afterward.

EDIT: Volume leveling's problem, not WMP in general.

TV Area

Media Player 10 has a "TV" area. What is it's purpose? No shows are offered for download and as far as I know there is no "media database" for lookups and automatic sorting/organization of movies. Add the ability to purchase shows for download via MSN and rename it to "All TV / Movies".

Universal Plug and Play (uPNP) support (aka Windows Media Connect)

Media Player should act as a uPNP media renderer. In other words, it should be able to browse media on uPNP Media Servers using Windows Media Connect and play the music. If my wife has music on her machine, and I have music on my machine, and a few others on a network-attach storage device, I should be able to see it all as a huge, unified media list to browse and play. It's very frustrating having Microsoft tease us with the "connected home" concept but never come through on the implementation of it!

This would be especially awesome with wireless laptops or tablet PCs :-)

User Interface

* I would like to see an "information bar" like IE has in Windows XP SP2, to prevent annoying security dialogs.
* On some streams, I get the following security dialog every time I click on the View menu: "This enhanced content you are about to play uses the following Web page. You should only open Web pages from sources that you trust." If I do not click "Yes", or stop the stream, I cannot open the View menu! Example stream: http://www.itconversations.com/download.php?id=207&format=asx
* Better accessibility for people with screenreaders: use standard toolbars, menus, dialogs, etc, instead of your custom controls.
* Include a simple default skin which is saficient for most users.
* A simpler way for switching into and out of full screen.
* The process for selecting songs to playback should be fast and simple. The same for listening to purchased music.
* Skin size should not affect maximum video scaling.
* Consistent volume control among different programs.
* Customisable category list in master tree hierarchy. Provide the ability to define major categories shown. Provide the ability to remove categories like "All TV" or subcategories like "Contributing Artist" or "Composer" if they're not relevant to the user. (Personal aside: The latest category list in WMP 10 is so filled with unused categories that I've reverted to WMP 9 in frustration).
* Change the option: "Always on Top" to "Always on Top in Compact mode". -- ZippyV
* Ability to resize the Video and Visualization window (what you see when the player is minimized to its toolbar player, and you click the small button in its upper right corner). -- redefinery
* Ability to minimize the player to its toolbar player, but retain the visibility of the Video and Visualization window being open. Maybe the player can remember if the Video and Visualization window was previously open when it was last minimized to its toolbar player. -- redefinery
* URL drag-drop support. Why is this not currently supported?
* Hovering mouse over Shuffle, Repeat, Stop and Mute button will highlight the button, but the highlight only disapears when WMP is maximized.

Windowing

* It is impossible to alt-tab to WMP when the WMP toolbar is activated and WMP is minimized.
* Where is the always-on-top option?
* In Options, Player tab, Keep the Player on top of other windows. It would be more useful as a menu option, though.
* Minimize to system tray
* This already exists, in a much better form - right click on the task bar and turn on the Media Player toolbar - ShadowChaser

* Actually, the Media Player toolbar isn't perfect either. I use the Classic Windows look in XP. The Media Player toolbar is sized to work with the standard Windows XP taskbar, which is a little thicker than the Classic Windows taskbar. The taskbar resizes automatically when I minimize or restore Media Player. When I restore Media Player and the taskbar is once again Classic Windows-size, there's a gap between the taskbar and any non-maximized Internet Explorer windows I have open. Of course, I suppose this is really an Internet Explorer problem. Why isn't maximizing all IE windows by default an option? That just doesn't seem right. If you could make all IE windows open maximized by default (even those opened from links), this wouldn't be a problem. It also wouldn't be as much of a problem if IE had tabs, since links could be opened within one maximized IE window. As is, it makes the Media Player toolbar not as useful, unless you like resizing IE windows or don't mind the gap between the IE windows and the taskbar. I still think minimizing to system tray would be valuable even if everything I've described worked as it should. That way WMP could be controlled using "Foxy Tunes" in Firefox and/or Thunderbird and not have WMP taking up space on the taskbar at all. --trajj
Yes but this works only in XP - Nektar
* Better dual monitor support.
* Printscreen should always capture what is on the screen. (Video card overlays prevent this, perhaps they can come up with a workaround? - ShadowChaser)
* An easier way of making screenshots of videos.
* "Always on top" used to only apply to the skinned player. I liked it that way, because I would play vidoes on my skinned player on the side while browsing. However, if I have that option checked, the entire full player is also "always on top", meaning I can't switch to other windows when I'm messing with my library. Split the "always on top" option into two options. One for the skinned mode, and one for the full player mode.

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Don't add stuff here at the end -- scroll up and find the right place for it in the alphabetical list -- JonathanHardwick

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