Finally Talking about Windows Media Player
Let’s not get it wrong: Windows Media Player (WMP) is better than iTunes, VLC, Winamp and this thing called Media Jukebox. The main advantage WMP has over almost everything else is it’s recognition of the file system. I am flippantly certain that the Zune desktop team purposely ignored seriously supporting the Windows file system because their model customer does not understand the file system.
Alan Cooper the “Father of Visual Basic,” made it clear to me in the first edition of About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design that the concept of the file system was never meant to be understood by the general public. So the Zune team, writing software for multiple platforms has bypassed it entirely, preparing for the “future.” I can’t do that. I made the “mistake” of using the file system to categorize my music collection—the folders my music use have semantic meaning. Because Windows 7 uses the concept of the Library—and WMP fully exploits this—my folders have meaning.
One of the most frustrating things about Windows Media Player is its deliberate lack of rich support for album art. In 2007, Dale Preston writes:
To be honest, what I believe is going on here is that the Windows Media Player product team has sold out their customers in the interest of better relationships with the content providers and have limited us to low quality artwork in an attempt to protect copyrights of the music producers. Of course they totally ignore the fact that if I own a CD, I am well within my rights to create an image of my CD and display or use it as I please. Let alone the fact that, for all they know, my custom artwork could be totally custom art that is my own intellectual property and yet they destroy it without any warning, without creating any backup, and without ever giving me the choice to opt out.
So when I write my list of what I dislike about WMP, I am aware that many of these gripes are popular and quite legitimate—but Microsoft’s need to please entertainment corporations with documented historical ties to the mob tells me that these issues are not simply technical problems to overcome. Many of these “problems” are actually artifacts of a political view of “the consumer”:
- WMP does not support album art above 200 by 200 pixels.
- Duplicate entries often appear in Windows Media Player. I have dropped the underlying database files and eliminated non-default Library entries only to have the problem return. I suspect that Microsoft will not correct this problem in view of the Zune “future.”
- The wrong album art shows up at times in Windows Media Player. Ditto for the Zune “future”…
- WMP does not display the total time of the tracks “playing now”These problems with Windows Media Player have existed for years—this is telling me that the product is ‘kind of’ abandoned.