MP3 Insider: Ten reasons to love Microsoft Windows Media Player 11 – CNET reviews: “In its internal studies, Microsoft determined that libraries of 10,000 tracks or more are now typical rather than the exception to the rule. Thus, WMP 11 is engineered to handle not only thousands but also millions of tracks” — News.com
Well according to news.com Microsoft will release their Windows Media Player 11 beta on Wednesday. Hot Donkey. Deftly marketed with this exciting news is a big push for Urge, Microsoft’s answer to iTunes. This is to be expected of course, they don’t really make any money off of WMP11 and stand to make a lot of money off of Urge.
While I have played around with Windows Media Player 11 already (and really like it) both with a Vista beta and at CES earlier this year, I haven’t really been able to put it through the test as the Vista betas have not been stable enough for me in the past to import my large mp3 library. But you can bet that on Wednesday (assuming news.com is right) I’ll be downloading that sucker and trying it out in the more stable XP environment.
Apparently news.com originally was out with news that WMP 11 was released this morning but has since changed their story to Wednesday. There are rumored copies to be floating around out there in internetland though.
News.com gives 10 reasons why you might love WMP11 and while I skipped over all the inspired by iTunes/deft music store integration mumbo jumbo, it is reason number two (hard core performance) that I’m most excited about.
I will have a more detailed write up once I download it and play around with it on Wednesday but this is indeed good news!
Update: Jupiterresearch analyst Michael Gartenberg has an excellent write up on the new WMP11. He’s actually pretty impressed with the Urge music service.