Hmm... Did I ever like WMP? Yes of course back when version *9 released. I liked 10 but sticked with 9 for abit. Now I hate what Microsoft has DONE!

Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2 Out

WMP 11v2 is not bad, but I heard a lot of people are having problems with the installation and uninstallation of it. The interface is not too bad though.

And I thought it looked aweful.
Although the WMP Pro encoder did sound good at lower bitrates when I did some encodes with it, and I **cough, cough** grabbed the Fraunhofer Pro MP3 encoder from the installer to use outside fo WMP.

WMP 11 Beta is just too dark/black for me and I couldn't stand it when I tried it out. I also didn't like the fact that they changed so much that parts of it had to be re-learnt all over again, and not being a fan of previous versions like 9 and 10 I sure as hell wasn't going to take the time to figure out where everything was. I disliked it so much I'll never update to WMP 11 when it's final, the same goes for Vista to hell with it as well.

I'm sticking with WMP*10 and with Windows Xp Professional for a good 2 more years at least but I doubt it. I may upgrade in about a year after the release of Vista. That's what I did when Windows Xp came out. I stayed with 98SE for the darkest of times...

I've had Windows2000 until about 1 year ago. So I don't expect to get Vista until they release Vieanna (Vienna, w/e)

Vienna's probably gonna be the same as Vista(if not worse).

why use the Fraunhofer MP3 Encoder? LAME ,i believe, is better.

Of course LAME is better, well lame.exe is anyways

Just wanted a newer Windows MP3 Codec, that's all, and the one in WMP 11 Beta fixes an old quality bug from the FhG encoder that WMP 10 has, e.g.; J-Stereo ("Joint Stereo") not being used at certain bitrates with the High Quality switch enabled. Although to use it, it has to be renamed to l3codeca.acm and registered with regsvr32.

so what you're saying is that you use Windows Media Player 10. allrighty then; i got it.

VLC for Video, XM Play for audio - you're set. Interfaces on both are nothing fancy, but they both get the job done well.

XMPlay is nice because its portable. I keep it on my flash drive with about 200mb of really low quality wma files just so I have something to listen to when I'm using someone else's computer. The problem with it is that it has pretty horrible library functions, so its not good for large music collections.

Also I'm pretty sure Andavari uses foobar.

i've heard that VLC is just a broken version of ffmpeg. i tried VLC once and i absolutely hated it. it showed purple instead of white subtitles, it has a crappy GUI(what's with the volume control?), and it has even crashed once. for me, ffdshow(latest build) and Media Player Classic(latest build) work wonders.

Actually I rarely use it, the FhG Pro encoder if taken from the setup file can be used outside of WMP, it's more of one of those quirky ideals of I think I'll conduct a listening test. I however never rip anything with it because EAC is king!

Shame on Fraunhofer, even the encoder in WMP 11 Beta is broken to a degree, they fixed the J-Stereo bug that was in the WMP 10 FhG Pro encoder however now there's a new bug it can't encode in High Quality.

i like the look of the new WMP.

im downloading it straight away.

edit: wierd thing is the Beta 2 is smaller size than the first Beta. have they just taken something out? if so, then im not getting it.

Looks arn't everything...

WMP in activex looks better and otherwise I do not care, it is allways minimized.
They could make it to be able to play QT, not only RT and some common formats.

I think of WMP like WinZip, really popular and whatnot, but doesn't really support jack for other formats.

If Microsoft want it to ever be taken seriously as a true "Windows Media Player" (no pun to its name) they need to natively out-of-the-box support AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Musepack, WavPack just to name a few.

mp3 as well. they use DirectShow for that