From: Ellen K. 

I want a CD player that DOESN'T go fetch album information, it's a PITA,
every time I stick in a CD I have to go to that box and click
"cancel".

On Thu, 09 Jan 2003 09:15:20 +0000, Chris Robinson
 wrote in message
:

>WMP9 is brilliant - I've been using it a while now (in beta,
>obviously).  It does have some bad points like how it tries to
"protect"
>your media - I checked the properties for some of my MP3's and the
>protected field said "yes" - not sure if this means anything or not?
>
>There are many good points, below are a few (or more) that I've come to
>really like:
>
>- You can minimise WMP9 to your taskbar where it lays (if you want it
>to) as a mini-player embedded in the taskbar.  It's far more useful than
>cut-down Winamp (i.e. when you kinda half-minimise Winamp into a smaller
>player and can still access some controlls).
>
>- ID tag updateing in simple - you can right-click an MP3 and select
>"find details" and it'll go off and look for information based on (i
>assume) the file name - you then select the correct result (usually
>pretty sucessful) and it'll update all the ID tag info - nice!.  Also
>(as with WMP8) you can still manually edit the ID tag info of any MP3
>on-the-fly.
>
>- Folder monitoring is also good.  When you first set up WMP9 you can
>set a drive/ folder etc for it to scan for media - you can then set it
>to monitor this location(s) and automatically add any media it finds to
>your library.
>
>- Auto playlists are pretty cool too.  WMP9 allows you to specify (as
>well as including built in ones)
>auto playlists.  These are playlists created automatically based on a
>set of criteria about your media.  For example, a couple of the included
>playlists are "fresh tracks I haven't listened to yet" and
"my favorite
>tracks" - it does the favorite tracks by applying a rating to each track
>(defaults to 3 out of 5 stars i think).  If you like a track you can
>bump up the star rating and then it'll automatically be added to your
>favorites.
>
>- And finally album art and web integration.  WMP9 fetches album art and
>(if you want it to) album info for the track currently palying (like,
>track list, arist info, web links etc).  I like the album art
>automatically fetching (in WMP8 you had to include the JPEG's in the
>same folder as the MP3's for WMP to display the album art) as seeing the
>cd sleeve design etc is one of the things I liek about playing CD's as
>oppsed to MP3's (maybe I'm just odd?)
>
>Oh yeh, and it's pretty quick too! (I run it no probs on a PII 350).
>
>Hope this helps,
>Chris.
>
>Dave Ings wrote:
>
>> Is there a short list of reasons somewhere why I might be
>> interested? I continue to use Winamp Classic and/or RealOne V2 and/or
>> MusicMatch V7.x, depending on the task, and past releases of WMP were
>> quite simply not remotely competitive with these products,
>> function-wise. (I.e. I gave up caring a long time ago.) Also, without
>> MP3 support, I don't care from the get-go. Does WMP V9 finally provide
>> MP3 support?--
>> Regards,
>> Dave Ings,
>> Toronto, Canada
>>
>>      "Rich"  wrote in message
news:3e1ba765$1{at}w3.nls.net...
>>      For those that care, the final WMP9 can be downloaded from
>>      http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/player.aspx.
>>      The final Encoder, SDKs, et al are also available.  The
>>      player supports Windows 98 SE, Windows Me, Windows 2000, and
>>      Windows XP. Rich
>>

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