Windows Media Player 12 Sucks Eggs

To be fair, in the beginning, I bashed WMP 12 as much as some people here have done. I sort of still prefer the design of WMP 11 but have grown to like WMP 12 as it includes GPU Acceleration for all video playback and its playback interface as well as Library Management is very good.

The real problem was that when I searched for a replacement for WMP 12 in the time I bashed it, other software I tried came up really short, VLC due to its interface, Foobar2000 due to its limitation of being an audio only player, and others due to similar limitations. I personally do not like to have three of four or pieces of software to do the functions that one piece of software integrated can do and that was the real problem when looking into replacements as the only piece of software that I could find to replace WMP 12 was WMP 11 and I figured, I'd just get used to WMP 12, which when you really get down to it is a good piece of software.

The problem I found with other players was their limited scope, which for their releases and intended audience are just fine but I like to have an all-in-one solution and most of the alternative players wouldn't work for me. This is a subjective opinion of WMP 12.

Of course you get used to the limitations and working around the bugs after a while.
I love WMP12 even despite those, that's why I can afford to bash it, because I want Microsoft to take these criticisms into account and improve WMP, there is still a lot of room or reasons for improvements. Just saying...

Adding new features is also no excuse for dropping good ones or introducing regression bugs (compared to WMP11), so I think it's our job to keep on bashing constructively until Microsoft takes the hint, even if it requires provocative thread titles. ^-^

WMP library management is great indeed, but there are little things that could be improved at little cost, like a tag editor (partially present in WMP11), the ability to use these tags, for instance to playback all 5-star songs from a specific genre or artist. The tags are basically totally useless meta-information if you can't do anything out of them. Some easily fixable bugs about artwork too.

When you have a really big and eclectic library, you are very limited in your playback options. I get too much music to waste hours every week creating or editing fixed playlists, I'd rather combine several tags to create dynamical playlists.

Like you, I would also like to use WMP12 as an integrated solution for all my media needs, but where's the "Radios" section in the left bar? I ended up entering radio URLs in the "Playlists" section, one playlist per radio. Where's also blu-ray playback? WMP12 can play SD DVDs.

Why is WMP mono-session? I use VLC and/or KMP only because it's the only way to pause my WMP music playback while I check out a small video. I'd rather watch it in a separate WMP session or in the same session if I could pause and resume my current playback without losing it, which sounds like a very basic common sense idea. And the ranting goes on and on...

I have deleted the files from my music folder, and cleared the recycle bin. And WMP 12 deleted half of them and left the rest in there but of course they dont play because they have been deleted. Why does it refuse to delete those songs? It is very annoying and it's like it doesnt respond at all. I've tried to delete it 50 times. Anyone know how to fix this?

Chimel said:

Why is WMP mono-session? I use VLC and/or KMP only because it's the only way to pause my WMP music playback while I check out a small video. I'd rather watch it in a separate WMP session or in the same session if I could pause and resume my current playback without losing it, which sounds like a very basic common sense idea.

This. That's why I use foobar2000 for audio and MPC for video. One player just can't do everything properly.

whoopu4free said:

I have deleted the files from my music folder, and cleared the recycle bin. And WMP 12 deleted half of them and left the rest in there but of course they dont play because they have been deleted. Why does it refuse to delete those songs? It is very annoying and it's like it doesnt respond at all. I've tried to delete it 50 times. Anyone know how to fix this?

Songs that won't play because it has been deleted will get a blue circle with an exclamation point to the left of the title when highlighted. Right click on the blue circle to get a submenu with the option to delete.

The mono-session concept you mentioned Chimel is actually something I completely forgot about. I sometimes would like to pause one thing while I play another. The preview function does it in regard to audio to a certain extent though I've never tried it for video (don't know if it even works).

But yeah, some features shouldn't have been dropped from WMP 11. I'm still not a big fan of switch between two windows to watch my videos and manage my library. I've grown used to it but would prefer to have one integrated interface again like WMP 11.