New Media Player Has Improvements but Also Flaws
If Windows Media Player is your favorite tool for playing CDs, recording discs or watching video on your PC, you’ll find a host of things to like about the new version included in Windows XP.
That’s not to say WMP is the best in its class. Although the customized player for XP is better in several small ways than the latest free version of WMP, it’s not a great leap forward. Many of the new features, such as copying music faster, adding lyrics to song files and providing links to hundreds of online radio stations, already will be familiar to users of competing software from MusicMatch, RealNetworks and others.
WMP is, however, the first software to take advantage of the built-in capabilities of XP, which range from integrated CD recording to better management of digital songs and pictures. Many of those capabilities are available to competing software developers, said David Caulton, product manager for Microsoft’s Windows Digital Media division.
Probably the most revolutionary feature of XP is its stability, which enables computers to take on some home-entertainment tasks that they hadn’t been reliable enough to do before. A good example is recording television shows digitally, which requires a PC that can stay on for days without crashing.
Before you can turn your PC into a digital VCR, though, you’ll need a TV tuner card and software from a company like Houston-based SnapStream Media. XP enhances such software by making it easier to move recorded videos across home networks, onto CDs and into portable devices.
Faster, smarter: XP provides more convenient and significantly faster CD recording, or burning, than WMP 7.1, the latest non-XP version of the software. You can burn a 40-minute set of songs in five to seven minutes using WMP for XP, while the same set would take you about 25 minutes with WMP 7.1.
The improvement stems from Microsoft’s decision to build CD-burning software directly into XP, removing the speed limits set by WMP, Caulton said. Of course, recorders also have speed limits set by their hardware, so older recorders may not be capable of burning much faster. One drawback is that you can burn only audio CDs with WMP, not CD-Rs packed with compressed music files. Nor can you record a few songs and reserve the rest of the CD for future burning. XP lets you do both of those things within Windows Explorer or the My Music folder, but not through WMP.
If you’re stuck with a dial-up modem, XP also helps identify songs in your music collection without your having to go online. Few CDs have the artist’s name, song titles and other identifying information encoded onto the disc. Instead, that information typically is supplied online by Gracenote, which owns CDDB, or Alliance Entertainment Corp., which supplies the All Music Guide. So when you play or rip CDs, you need to be connected to the Internet to obtain automatically the artist, album and song information.
The new version of WMP copies and saves the information it grabs from the All Music Guide, enabling a computer to identify a CD that’s played repeatedly without your having to go online each time. You also can rip CDs offline and store them without any identifying information until the next time you’re connected to the Net, when WMP will add the artist name, song titles and album art automatically.
The album art not only pops up in WMP when songs from the CD are played, but it also graces the folders where the songs are stored. For now, though, that feature applies only to CDs ripped with WMP.As with previous versions, WMP for XP can rip songs only in Microsoft’s format, Windows Media Audio. Microsoft lets you plug in software that can rip songs in the popular MP3 format, but you’ll have to pay a third party $10 for the privilege.
Nor can WMP play songs in any format other than Microsoft’s or MP3. Though that may further Microsoft’s goal of establishing Windows Media as the default format for music, it won’t help if you download songs in the Liquid Audio format--a popular choice for promotional singles--or music secured with InterTrust’s scrambling technology.
Peace on the desktop: If you keep several jukebox programs on your computer, you’ll often find them battling for control over the CD drive, downloaded music files and other media on the PC. XP enforces a truce between programs, making it easier for you to control which programs are used with the different types of music and video files. It also lets you change your selection each time you put a disc into the CD or DVD drive.
The typical jukebox program creates an index to all the music on your computer, but it loses the ability to play songs if you move them from one folder to another. The new version of WMP overcomes that problem, letting you move files without disrupting playlists.
One other enhancement on the music front is the ability to add lyrics to song files. Unfortunately, you can’t add information about song tempo, mood and other information that might prove more useful when creating playlists.
A glaring weakness in WMP has been the lack of a sophisticated automatic playlist creator, and the new version continues to come up short on that front. Microsoft sells a $40 add-on program called Plus for Windows XP that includes a rudimentary “Personal DJ” function, but it’s hampered by its inability to generate playlists based on mood, tempo, situation or year.
More useful elements of Plus include tools to control WMP with voice commands through a PC microphone, to make labels for CDs and jewel cases and to convert large WAV, MP3 and Windows Media files into more compact Windows Media files. Still, most of the audio enhancements in Plus are available for free or lower cost from competing programs.
Getting the full picture: WMP plays video as well as music, and the XP version offers several improvements in the way online and disc-based videos are handled.
The new WMP is the first version to offer playback controls when watching videos in full-screen mode, so you no longer have to switch back to a smaller video window just to find the “pause” or “stop” buttons.
WMP also can play DVDs on properly equipped computers. Although the features are similar to those in the software commonly bundled with DVD drives, WMP can add background information about the film, its director and stars. You have to be online to get the data from Alliance Entertainment’s All Movie Guide, but once it’s been obtained for a particular DVD, it remains stored on your PC.
As with music, WMP can burn downloaded or stored videos onto CDs or transfer them onto portable devices if the copyright holder hasn’t prohibited it. Unfortunately, WMP doesn’t support the industry-standard formats for disc recording, such as Video CD. That means a video disc burned with WMP can’t be played on a living room DVD player; instead, it can be viewed only on a Windows PC.
XP also reprises Windows Movie Maker, a feature introduced in Windows Me. The main improvements are the ability to store and transmit video without compression for better picture quality and a simpler process for capturing video from a camera.
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Jon Healey covers the convergence of entertainment and technology. He can be reached at jon.healey@latimes.com.
