Internet Explorer only choked once – killing all open windows including the one where I was writing this blog entry – during the writing of this Windows Media 10 overview (I won’t say “review” because I try not to review beta software).



After all, beta means they are still working on it, and work on it they are: Microsoft has released Windows Media Player 10 beta version.

Windows Media Player 10 is being refined to provide a great experience for discovering, playing, and taking your digital media anywhere. We are still in the early stages, but this technical beta lays the groundwork for the great end-to-end digital media experience coming with the final release for Windows XP.

The new features include:

“Sleek New Design“ - there is not a dramatic difference here except that they moved the main nav buttons from along the left border to the top, reduced the number of main buttons from eight to six and made the text shorter and font size larger. The new buttons atop are: Now Playing, Library, Rip, Burn, Sync and Guide. On a different colored tab still atop sits Music and Radio. As far as being a “new design” really the only thing I see different in the design is the color is a lighter shade of blue and the interface window has more content space, which is never a bad thing.

“Choice of Online Stores“ - Currently this feature is not fully fleshed out, as I was only able to see Napster and Cinema Now which were plugins I already had installed. As of this writing (and the most recent Windows Media 10 technical beta available from the download site), Napster Premium users are probably not going to want to install this for some of the following reasons:
1) No matter what users do, it keeps saying you don’t have the most current plugin, even when you download the “new” plugin from the list.



2) you cannot run the Napster Premium client at the same time as Windows Media Player 10 beta. In fact, even when I tried to close the Windows Media Player it kept running in the background and I had to do CTRL + ALT + delete and select to stop the process manually.



3) You cannot run Windows Media Player 9 and Windows Media Player 10 on the same machine. Napster Premium users like me who enjoyed the ease of using one application to demo music and download tracks for offline listening as part of the service are going to have to choose one or the other at the moment. I did successfully test that if you download through the Napster Premium client that the tracks will still play in Windows Media 10 beta so that’s good news. Unfortunately, Windows Media doesn’t rescan or notice when the new music is available in the library, so I had to take two steps: first download through Napster Premium client and then launch Windows Media Player 10 and drag and drop the new songs into the library. Not exactly ease of use. When you start Windows Media Player 10 for the first time it does search your hard drive for music to add to the library and that process seemed smooth and bug-free.

“Enhanced Device Support” - this is the promised big deal of this new Windows Media Player major version: that users will be able to more easily move their music around in portable devices like PDAs and MP3 players.

The Auto Sync feature was developed to enable users to quickly and easily take the content they want, wherever they want. With support of the new Microsoft Multimedia Transport Protocol (MTP)¹ technology, connecting devices and transferring digital content has become both incredibly seamless and fast.

Although the example devices are only portable MP3 players (none of which I use or own) so I could test. I tried to “auto-sync” up with my iPAQ Pocket PC some of the Napster Premium downloads (the ones where you can listen offline, not purchased tracks) and the result: “no devices detected” — This is a bummer because why can’t I move these tracks to listen on my relatively new iPAQ Pocket PC? Anybody out there know if this is possible (or is intended to be)? I realize if I buy the tracks it is a different deal, but I am paying a monthly fee (to Napster as of this writing) to essentially rent the music and if I can listen to these tracks legally offline on my PC for no additional charge, why shouldn’t I be able to listen to them on my Pocket PC? This is one area where DRM just totally breaks down in my mind. I thought this issue was (part of) what Bill Gates was saying Windows Media 10 (beta) would deal with? Maybe I just misunderstood.

“Improved All-in-One Smart Jukebox” - Marketing hype aside, I’m not seeing where Windows Media Player 10 has improved significantly enough to warrant the major version jump from 9 to 10. They have added a new option: “recorded TV playback” which is moving it towards sort of a hybrid TiVO/jukebox? I saw this paragraph and chuckled:

Windows Media Player 10 builds upon smart jukebox features designed to give more control of the playback experience, while reducing the amount of work required to find or organize your collection.

Smart jukebox? If it was so smart then why didn’t it recognize the new Napster files I downloaded automatically? Why did I have to add them separately to the library?

To summarize, there is nothing really eye-opening here that I can see except some buttons moving around, a new slot to pimp buying music online legally (which I don’t see as a negative thing), a new and/or revised DRM scheme (the auto sync) for portable devices. Perhaps when Windows Media Player 10 leaves beta it will come with additional, significant improved features and functions? In the meantime, save your time and wait. Move along people, nothing to see here.

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