Charles - Any Word On Interviews With The Media Player 12 Team? | The Coffeehouse

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

Especially since I found that all my nice album art I put in my mp3s are ignored by WMP12.

Link to more info:

http://dalepreston.com/Blog/2009/08/laughable-album-art-craziness-in.html

I think this is a doosey screw-up and I'd like the reasoning behind it. Programs like WMP are supposed to get better with age, not take huge steps back like this one...

CKurt
while( ( !succeed=try() ) ) { }

Yup no album art here to! But I do get art in the Zune software!

Also, Media player really takes a lot of my CPU when indexing my library on Win 7 RTM.

stevo_
Human after all

LOLOLOLOLOL..

Oh wait that wasnt funny at all, such a non issue.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to CKurt

#Oct 23rd @ 10:53 AM

There's album art. But if you have nice 800x800 pics in your mp3s, WMP12 isn't fully using your artwork for your music, which is quite unacceptable.

spivonious

Wow, you mean you created higher res album art for every mp3 you have? I can't even imagine how long that would take.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to spivonious

#Oct 23rd @ 11:10 AM

Well doesn't take long as you do it as you go along. Sgt Peppers needs a cover, just go to a site like discogs.com, copy a nice version of the cover, plop it into MediaMonkey, and done.

The thing is that Media Player 11 was different. It would show the embedded album cover at it's 100% size, so even if you had a huge one, it didn't, at the very least, shrink it to the size of the area it's in it just filled up the whole area. Speaking of the Now Playing area here of course.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

I'd also like to see an interview with the WMP people. They seem to be one of the most silent teams Microsoft has (do they even have a blog?) and metadata has always been a disaster. Before any of the Windows 7 betas were out we all had to just sort of guess about what WMP12 was going to have because nobody said a word. By the time they were out is was a done deal. Why always the silence? How do they work? Who are they, anyway? What's in the future for WMP? I think it'd be interesting.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Meh, WMP has been full of regressive feature changes from the beginning. Because I feel like it, here's a list:

WMP7: Used waaaaay more CPU than WMP6 and had a seriously ugly UI. Skin mode only made this tolerable. The equaliser used disproportionate CPU compared to the EQ in other programs (and sounded worse to boot)
WMP8: An improvement in every category... but was only available for Windows XP
WMP9: WMP perfection, I loved the online features.... but it gimped MPEG video support in the playlist
WMP10: Unecessarily went full-on with the glossy UI style, dropped the media guide, forced cleartype with no way to disable it
WMP11: Breaks Fitt's Law, the Vista-esque black UI (which is only on XP, eh?) looks horrible and the color-chooser feature doesn't work well with it (it's too dark) along with so many other changes. What's worse is how this "update" is forced on people as part of the latest DRM updates.

Not having tried WMP12 yet, I cannot pass judgement, but if Windows 7 is anything to go by I expect it'll only slightly irritate me. (I assume it won't be back-ported to XP?)

obrienslalom
(2 2 2 3) *3 | 3 3 3

In reply to Bas

#Oct 23rd @ 11:21 AM

I wouldn't mind seeing the team. However, I have no interest in hearing them defend whatever the issue in this thread is. The album art could be a picture of bill gates wearing a toga on every singe album and it still wouldn't be 'taking a huge step back' (25x25 or 800x800, whichever is worse).

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to obrienslalom

#Oct 23rd @ 11:52 AM

It has nothing to do with the album art. It has everything to do with my metadata in which album art is an important piece of it. Forcing all album art in an interface like the Now Playing at 200x200 or whatever it is, would do nothing to it's impresssion as a media player full screened. As an example.

lars

Why is embedded images a "loophole" that need to be plugged? Why would anyone want to cripple this feature?

Charles
Welcome Change

In reply to Harlequin

#Oct 23rd @ 12:26 PM

We will add this to our request queue ->WMP interview.

C

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

In reply to Harlequin

#Oct 23rd @ 12:26 PM

Oh yea, and then there's the Win7/WMP - cannot change the picture while the files are being updated. Which is all the flipping time.

CreamFilling512

In reply to W3bbo

#Oct 23rd @ 11:48 AM

WMP 12 is actually a nice improvement over the last version.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to CreamFilling512

#Oct 23rd @ 1:45 PM

It's an awesome improvement over WMP11. Gorgeous UI and well thought out.

But I'm a fan of Now Playing...thus the album cover issue Smiley

LeoDavidson

In reply to spivonious

#Oct 23rd @ 11:10 AM

There are some pretty good tools which automate getting album art for you, with configurable sources & resolution. Good ripping tools will grab it for you when making new cd rips too, of course.

I saw the AlbumArtFixer tool linked in the OP does something similar to what I've been doing by hand since moving to Vista: Permission music files so that WMP (and its sharing services) cannot modify them and trash all the album art. That really should be fixed. Even if WMP itself doesn't use/support high-res album art it shouldn't be auto-trashing the album covers in files which contain it.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

In reply to CreamFilling512

#Oct 23rd @ 1:45 PM

Well, anything would be Tongue Out

I see since WMP10 that Microsoft has included an MP3 ripping feature, I was wondering if anyone's done any testing on how well it compares to say... LAME, or the Intervideo or Sonic "MP3 XPacks" users of WMP9 were instructed to install?

What about DVD playback? I know XP's Media Center included the Sonic MPEG-2 codecs, but I imagine it's all standard-issue now that Media Center is part of Windows?

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

In reply to Harlequin

#Oct 23rd @ 1:52 PM

I don't know about specific WMP12 issues but...

There is a reason why embeddable album art is limited to 200x200:

WMA files can be played on a variety of devices and all these device support them in a way or another. It turns out that some devices (car decks, in particular) literally CRASHED is a file had a larger than 200x200px album art embedded. Apparently there had been enough feedback about this that (I think) the team may have decided to limit the size for all supported files just to make sure. Of course, everyone can imagine the scenario where a file - encoded/edited on Windows - crashing a car entertainment system (maybe even the GPS?) would be an easy target for lawsuits and stuff like that Smiley

Typhoon87
Facilitator of our reality

In reply to PaoloM

#Oct 23rd @ 5:57 PM

It definatly is odd how this team has no blog, no real interviews on oh say CHANNEL 9 and only seems to deliver us about 1 update every two or three years. I am not saying that you need to cram an update down our throats every month like Itunes does but there must be some happy medium maybe try to shoot for like two or three updates a year?

If worst comes to worst just replace Media Player with Zune software V4 is nice but is still missing some features like radio and some file format support move the additional resources to the zune team.

FYI I actually created a thread with pretty much the same question as this one way back in May and got no answer.

( http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/470880-Media-Player-team/)

LeoDavidson

In reply to Typhoon87

#Oct 23rd @ 6:32 PM

Nowhere to report bugs to that I can find, either. (At least, I think all I could find on Connect was some messages explcitly saying that it wasn't for WM(P)-related bugs.)

There is a newsgroup but it's not clear if it's monitored or what the deal is.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to LeoDavidson

#Oct 23rd @ 6:38 PM

The social site is somewhat of an official site. Microsofties post too...

e.g.

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/GettingReadyforWindows7/thread/67ac2992-e76e-408a-90a8-0fa173885a6e

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to PaoloM

#Oct 23rd @ 5:57 PM

I see that as a reason for generating the folder.jpg, but I don't see why Windows 7 Home Edition on my computer has to have the same limitations as a Zune.

LeoDavidson

In reply to Harlequin

#Oct 23rd @ 8:53 PM

Thanks! I didn't know that was there.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

In reply to PaoloM

#Oct 23rd @ 5:57 PM

Do car decks also crash on MP3's with huge album art? That may just be a reason for me to just drop WMA altogether and convert everything to MP3. My car radio skips songs with huge album art, but I also don't want to look at 200x200 album art on a 40" TV when playing stuff on media center.

Man I hate technology.

Blue Ink
C you

If there is an interview with the WMP people, I'd like to have a definitive statement about MOV support... it seems to be hit or miss at the moment (some won't play, others will only play the audio track).