This is Super Annoying Hosted on ZooomrGrrrrrr…. I hate this screen. It means that I can no longer listen to my music on Windows Media Player for a good 24 hours or so and it pops up at least 50% of the time. It totally locks down Windows Media Player 11 and makes it entirely unuseable and it shows up ALL THE TIME!
My understanding was that Windows Media Player 11 was supposed to be optimized for large digital libraries, but in my opinion Windows Media Player 11 is far, far worse than Windows Media Player 10.
I wish for once, someone could come out with a reasonable answer that I could understand as to why Windows Media Player sucks so bad with large digital libraries.
On the flipside, as Windows Media Player makes my mp3 library totally useless about 80% of the time, I’ve been spending more and more time with Pandora, which I have to say is one heck of a cool site. Seriously, spend some time with it. I was a little annoyed earlier today when I was told that I’d exceeded my fast foward allocation for the hour per their licensing, but still, it’s a pretty great service. And it works a hell of a lot better than Windows Media Player does.
Why, oh why, oh why, oh why, must Windows Media Player suck so badly?
What part of Beta don’t you understand?
get a Mac and use quicktime.
Anonymous. I understand betas. And I also understand large public betas. Irrespective of the beta, I’ve been under the impression that WMP would provide performance enhancements for large digital libraries. I’ve seen no evidence in the beta of this. This is frustrating. Yes, I give beta software some breathing room. But this thing ain’t even alpha.
I have a somewhat medium sized library and none of this problems. The intial scan was long and painful but since then I have had no real major issue like this. I think WMP11 is so much better than WMP10 it’s not even funny. Seriously, I don’t know what’s wrong with your setup but you’re missing out!
Anonymous, there are certain types of problems that you can expect to be fixed in beta and others that you can’t. The performance problems in WMP11 are the type that probably won’t be fixed in beta.
I agree with Thomas about the state of WMP11. There are weird long pauses that lock up the whole system everywhere in the app. On my system, the library performance it seems to get slower each day I use it, and although it “starts up” quickly, it takes quite a long time before I can actually use it without being interrupted by a pause that interrupts my train of thought.
It’s a piece of crap. It’s made even more frustrating by the fact that it COULD be good. There are a lot of neat things in it, and the new UI is interesting. But, it’s unusable in its current state and I think it’s too far gone for you to expect that it’ll be ready by the time it’s out of beta.
Thomas,
Stinks your having so much problems with the Public Beta of Media Player 11. The version that comes with Vista build 5472 is much much better. I hope some one over in the eHome team like Charlie Owen sees this and sends you a new DVD with it on there quick! I’ve had a few issues with the public beta too, but not to this extent. Hopefully the Media Player team will release a new beta or final soon.
Shahn, it will be interesting to see how the new version with Vista plays with my large library. I’ve got a copy of the latest Vista build coming from Waggener Ed. Hopefully I’ll find the experience better. I’d be more interested in an actual copy that I could use with XP as my daily player of course vs. something I work up on a test machine.
And I wouldn’t be so bothered by this in beta but it’s just this screen shot tends to attack my computer almost every single time I load up WMP. It’s super frustrating. I don’t even mind whatever it’s doing if it would just unlock for 10 seconds so that I could get some music rolling while it’s doing whatever the heck it’s doing.
WMP has so much potential. But it’s had this potential for years. Microsoft needs to throw some talent at this player and get it running right once and for all.
re: WMP 11, I haven’t had the problems, but then, my library is probably much smaller.
However, there might be some info here to help, but doesn’t look like there is a “fix”, but only some ways to recover…
http://tinyurl.com/fdn3v
re: WMP 11, I haven’t had the problems, but then, my library is probably much smaller.
However, there might be some info here to help, but doesn’t look like there is a “fix”, but only some ways to recover…
http://tinyurl.com/fdn3v
As a serious question and not a snotty Apple fanboy. Why do you prefer Windows Media Player over iTunes?
I ripped my whole collection and as it got huge and winamp started choking I switched to iTunes and have been really happy with it. I think as a stand alone media player it’s a nice app even if you don’t own an ipod or download DRM’ed music.
WMP 11 beta is not compatable with MCE 2005.
It does work with the vista MCE
Why not just install iTunes and be done with it? Works great with large libraries (hopefully you didn’t do something as foolish as encoding your songs in WMA). Sure it doesn’t work with MCE2005 but apparently neither does WMP 11 beta.
You may want to take a look at J. River Media Center. It’s an awesome program for sorting huge libraries, compatible with most mp3 players and is extremely extensible with plugins for multi-zone audio and more.
Anonymous said…
“WMP 11 beta is not compatable with MCE 2005.”
Don’t know about that. I have it installed on my MCE 2005 machine and it works just fine. Of course, you won’t get all the benefits you would have if you were running Vista (faster library access), but I have had no problems at all.
Seriously, I’ve used Winamp (I used to be soooo into it and write visualizations and stuff), I’ve used WMP for years but iTunes is by far the best media player. Especially for large libraries, whether on Mac or Windows. iTunes is *much* faster and far easier to use.
Make sure you switch it from AAC to MP3 by default though. And you can disable all the Music Store integration.
“weird long pauses that lock up the whole system everywhere in the app”
sounds like Windows XP
Yet another useless “works fine for me” comment, but also a question; how BIG is the BIG library?
In my library I have roughly 1300 albums and around 10,000 songs. Now, if your library is much larger than that, never mind. But, if it’s the same or smaller, then I am starting to think there must be some other problem.
I know you’ve been having problems for quite some time, and you’re one if the biggest reasons I upgraded. My situation improved dramatically from WMP10 to WMP11, so I am just trying to better understand why yours hasn’t…
It is beta and anyone with problems should go ahead and let MS know about it so it can be improved/fixed. That’s why the beta is released! Thomas, I checked with a WMP11 developer and without having more details he said this, “It seems like his system is having problems with his library, where it’s getting corrupt and repeatedly reset/rebuilt or similar.
There’s no indication of any conditions that lead to this reset, so it would be hard to comment upon why this failing. If it’s happening “50% of the time”, it sounds like something is of course greatly amiss with this system – either he doesn’t have write access to “%userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player” or something else equally hideous is happening…”
I’ve been working with WMP 11 very closely for a little while now at my new job. Seeing the kinds of bugs we’ve been working on, I’m shocked Microsoft put this out in beta form yet. I can tell you it’s getting better, more stable, and smoother every day. In the end, I’m not sure if it’ll be as good as other solutions out there, but I agree – something has to be done about the WMP line.
I’ve never been a fan of WMP. But trust me, don’t write it off just yet. I think future public releases will be a lot better than what’s been released for public testing.
for some reason when i try to install WMP 11 it says my windows is not genuine this is really getting annoying is there anyway around this can some one help???
im not having any problems with WMP11,
except i just got the new version of google talk and the thing for displaying what song your listening to doesnt work.
works fine with media player 10 on my friends computer, so i wondered – is there any way to remove 11 or install 10 over it?
cheers
this is all very interesting
really,WMP11 is a mistake!
the library don’t support huge collection:(:(:(
i’ll uninstall it soon….
11 is not a mistake… it is a huge leap in GUI Organized Media players i am also having the same problem with my rather large collection this is just a bug that will be worked out shortly i hate microsofts bullshit beta’s as much as everyone else being that it is just a way for microsoft to work out bugs at a lower cost AKA Free…. but this is life i found a fairly helpfull link at http://zachd.com/pss/pss.html#medialibrary
Check it out it should help..
WMP 11 is a total mistake and killed my music collection pre-back-up (ugh). I’m normally an Itunes/WinAmp user and decided to give the new beta a chance.
When it added my 5k mp3 library it created duplicates, even tripling the amount of songs. After exhaustively deleting most of the copies, the beta froze and apparently deleted all copies of any song the was duplicate. Moreover, it removed all my music from iTunes. Anyway it’s taken out huge chunks from my library (yeah my trash bin chose that moment to refresh), and WMP 11 has massive lag.
I no the problem. My computer and a bunch of others have a very strict firewall on them, making it impossible 4 ppl 2 play music an them.
I’ve been having problems with the public beta 2… so far i’ve got half my CDs ripped, bout 17,000 mp3s. It locks on startup and hammers my processor as it updates(?) the library. I’ve just deleted the library from it and it is still hitting 50% cpu on startup…! nothing in the options I can see, it’s not set to autoscan my filestore? I’d hoped it could help manage and use my collection as it’s ripped, but i’ll have to look for something else.
my wmp 11 has a library of almost 1000 songs and it works fine but some albums are split up in all these parts, yet there all written the same, do other people have this problem?
Yup, I have a number of albums that are split up. It’ll put a random selection of tracks under one entry, and the remainder in the second entry, both with the same artwork!! Haven’t yet found out how to fix it …… anyone?
I have found that going into the Options/Library on wmp11 and uncheck the boxes under the “automatic media information updates for files”. I was having trouble with wmp relocating files to other folders and renaming some files. This has seemed to help with the problem. Has anybody had problems with songs being added to playlists?
yeah i am having the exact same problem and found this looking for a solution and in answer to the bloke who its saying his pc isnt genuine its because the copy of xp installed on ya pc is pirated and there is a complicated half fix which gets rid off the annoying pop ups but u still cant update it
WMP11 hate it!! I have a 78,000 plus track music library. WMP11 takes one hour from start up each time before I can use it with my library. I use Creative Mediasource Organizer. Excellent, copes extremely well with my library, burns, rips and you can even update TAG info very easily.
The product in its current form is unusable. Those who say it is Ok are not exercising it properly. If you are adding files on a daily basis then the library WILL become corrupt. No question. A one off load will probably be reasonably stable. Or a clean build PC with only WMP11 installed on it! I have now had to rebuild my library about six times since the production release came out… My beef is losing any custom info, e.g. parental controls, genre, etc., every time it goes. (I am using it primarily for video, not music.) I stream to various devices around the house (Z500,360,PS3). I would be less bothered if I could tag the avi files with this stuff so a rebuild was relatively painless. I have found that System Restore will bring it back successfully, so make those restore points regularly.