Windows Media Player 11

For once, Microsoft made a product that [everyone says] is so good that PC World gave it a product rating of 90, which not many products get. The player got a major facelift in just about all aspects, and sports many new and useful features.

The library has new views and layouts, and searching is both fast and easy. Burning discs is also smarter, with a feature that will figure out how many CDs you need to burn your selection. I would have to say that the Sync area got the best enhancements, giving you real, libary-oriented views of your player’s contents (meaning views like Artist, Album, Genre, Songs, and more; unlike the way Windows Media Player 10 just gave you a very basic tree list of your songs).

There is one thing that I’m not used to: Now Playing is not an actual playlist, it’s just a listing of the songs that are, well, ‘now playing’, for lack of a better term. With this new ideology, I find that the only way to easily just play a song now without losing the rest of my current playlist is to add the song to a playlist (in fact, I’m now only using a playlist to manage my now playing list). Also, I am looking forward to easily being able to sync a playlist to a device without transferring the songs contained in it. Someone at MisticRiver said it’s possible, but he wasn’t being too clear in his response.

My overall rating of windows Media Player 11 is 8/10, or Very Good, with a little room for improvment. It’s good to see Microsoft is setting a good trend with windows Media Player, which began with version 9. Let’s hope it continues to version 12 and beyond.