Aqua-Soft ForumsPost your experience installing and uninstalling WindowsMediaPlayer 9.
Did it mess-up your settings?
Did it change your ability to play DVDs ?
Vote On WMP9 (WindowsMedia Player)
I havent had many "expierences" with installing or uninstalling it, but it went smooth. There are many new features, like you can speed up audio, you can change the color settings for movies (hue, sat, contrast, brightness) and some other realy cool features.
I like it alot.
It is awesome, the last thing I found out about is that when you are in the media library, and you have a song in the say trance genre. -->click and hold it and drag it into say rock or 80's genre, and wmp9 automatically changes the genre type in the id3 tag to rock. and places it in the new genre.
The media library in wmp9 is peerless.
I want to uninstall wmp completely. I have major problems with ms media players past 6.4 and could do without them. I've tried to uninstall and even delete wmp but it's like a bad penny.
Any help would be appreciated.
Skeletonkey
I don't think you can uninstall any of the WindowsMediaPlayers versions completely. I think it is so much incorporated into the WindowsOS that you would get into unforseen problems. You can make another player the default player and pretty much eliminate the usage of WMP but uninstall I think it is a big NO! No!.
What I meant by uninstalling WMP9 is that the computer would go back to your previous version WMP8. Maybe for WMP9 it is a bigger No! No! because they do give a warning to do a restore point that uninstallation is not really do-able.
Hi all,
I actually like WMP9.0 a lot now that it is final.
I find the playlist management implementation a little confusing but this maybe because I just jumped right into it as opposed to reading the manual first.
I used it just last night to burn an audio CD. This was the first time I had attempted to use an all in one app to do that task.
It works flawlessly! Although it was not as fast as some specialize d CD writing apps, it did do the job I wanted it to do.
I like its feature set, in particular the auto volume leveling and SRS audio enchancments. I'm not to keen on it's visual effects but then again those are not that important to me.
In terms of load time and cpu usage, I do find it easier on resources than WMP8 was.
All and all, a good job by Microsoft.
All the best,
Grusic
WMP9 is an improvement over v8 in that it doesn't try to take over your system in the way it used to. You are still encouraged to use .wma although mp3 gets a more balanced support.
It does most things reasonably well and will satisfy media playing requirements of 99% of the PC population.
For the average non technical user who wants to hear the same music they rip from a CD playing on their PC it works.
The Digital Rights Management is evil to the core and even though WMP9 offers checkboxes to disable this I remain suspicious. Why for example after disabling all DMA stuff, does it create a directory for DMA Key backup?
Some of the new skins in the Plus pack are excellent. Bionic Dot in particular. (You can extract this from the PlusPack without installing the Pluspack).
I still find the interface to be very poor. It still is not intuitive and lacks user friendly features.
You still have to pay to rip MP3's - why when this is available free elsewhere with Lame?
I can't see why anyone interested on these forums would use it to play Video when the excellent QuickTime is available for the PC and there are great skins for DVD players.
The text displays always have that horrible Microsoft look and feel. You can make pretty much your whole system look like OSX and then WMP9 throws up horrible text windows.
It's about 80% there. If Microsoft allows third parties to add the much needed functions and added an Expert Interface that allowed you to do stuff like Write CD Text, Over Burn CD-R's, Normalize, Rip securely, select your encoder, etc, it would become far better.
Still nowhere near as good as choosing the best tools for the job in terms of features and unresticted choices.
2 more observations:
I have about 2,800 mp3's that read in and play perfectly in QCD, winamp2 and Winamp3. Out of these files I have 13 that WMP9 fails to play or read the length of the track and fails to read the tags. All of the 13 tracks are CBR 128 mp3's and I have checked all the tags to be correct. In other words there is nothing wrong with them and WMP9 will not play them.
When you read in a directory of music, one of the default ways to display the media is by Artist. However, for each Artist, there is a sub category of Album that is not the Artists Album, but is instead the Album that the Track was created from. This results in that entire Album being displayed. E.g. I have an Al Green track that came from the Soul compilation album "Blues Brother Souls Sister". Under Al Green I get the entire 20 tracks of the Soul album even though Al Green has only 1 track on it. That's dumb.
WMP9 is working great for me until now. no problem. although there are sometimes wrong timelength reported in WMP9 for certain DivX movies.
To play all divx/xvid files (gigs collection of Friends in my hdd) i prefer to use WMP9 instead of other player. quicktime is too slow to open file, wmp is much faster. and i don't think quicktime play codecs like divx or xvid. the looks also like a buggy player, the border is poor, and not shadow correctly.
other player that support multiple codecs like windvd is great, but still too slow to open single file. wmp9 again is the winner.
but for mp3 files, i don't use wmp9. too complicated for that task and very confusing. normal mp3 player like QCD is better for me. and I don;t like sound files and movie files association mixed up.
so, wmp9 is great for me to play normal avi/mpg files. 
I upgraded with no trouble. However, I rarely use it (only for WM streams). I play vids and music with other programs.
I installed without problems and i liked it a lot
I agree, it plays my hour plus porns well...
Generally speeking I like the new wmp update, but it still seems like it is an itunes wannabe, but with a much, much worse interface. I also dislike some of the terms they used for the menu items such as "queue it up" instead of add to que. They still kept the skin within a window idea, which i dislike, where even when you have the window mode off, it reverts to a full window when you hover your mouse near. The new colors in full mode are a much needed and wanted improvement, the speed changer is more gimmicky than anything else. Plug-in support is great, but so far there are few to be excited about (or even download). I still wish they would add an option to skin the full mode, because it is an overall good player, just with a clunky interface. Oh one more gripe, I also dislike how it forces you to have a "premium services" tab, and places it ahead of other more useful tabs like "Skin Chooser"
I think it's great. 
No problems as of yet, been using it for about 120 mins. It's alot quicker too. Yeah! -Go the crappy pc! -It has an improved look against its predecessors. heheee, but still need's a good old iTunes skin ontop of it. 
Cheers