Dylan Greene dot com

I miss the feature of pre 9 version where you could run multiple copies of WMP. In those days I would have music running on one copy, then pop up another to view an AVI. They took that away.

Steve - you can, MS just made it a little harder for us...

WMP Mixer is free DJ-station plug-in for WMP.

http://www.wmplugins.com/ItemDetail.aspx?ItemID=335

If you don't want to install anything, you can use this web page as "another copy of WMP9":

http://www.nwlink.com/~zachd/pss/v7multi.html

According to the Unofficial Windows Media Player FAQ, "multiple stand-alone players were turned off in WMP7+ due to library and device contention".

The FAQ can be found here:

http://www.nwlink.com/~zachd/pss/pss.html

All links here are from that FAQ.

Interesting. Thanks a ton. I sort of understand the device contention issues--for example overloading the audio devices to distortion level, but considering we can buy inexpensive multi-track audio programs that can manage this, I think it's a cop-out.

In the past I believe Microsoft themselves used WMP to show the multitasking capabilities of Windows. I seem to remember a Chicago beta (95) that had 4 windows running at the same time showing different videos.

Thanks again!

yeah, i really hate it when i click on a link or something no my computer and lose whatever i was listening to a moment ago.... it's __damn__ annoying.

winamp

Give iTunes a shot for the music. It won't play whatever WMV files you've got, but you can tell it to leave your music files in their original locations while you try it out. Try it for a couple weeks and see if you'll like it enough to trust it to manage your music collection (heck, I do).

Leland - I'm afraid to try it because of my lack of trust for Apple's Windows software. I had enough troubles with QuickTime, such as associating itself with everything it could possibly play (.jpg opening in QuickTime, even the jpg icon becoming the QuickTime icon), and with constant crashes (like if i got tired of waiting for a mov to download so I'd close the browser which would cause QT to crash and since IE was hosting the Netscape-style plug-in, it would sadly crash too.)

Same lack-of-trust reasons for Real (history of putting spyware and/or adware in their software and saying they didn't) - although they claim to be spyware and adware free now, and WinAmp - I won't install anything from AOL, especially now they AOL is money-hungry and Justin (WinAmp creator) has quit.

Microsoft beats them in the trust level *for me* because I know when they do something wrong, (such as privacy or security issue) it will be on the front page of news.com, Slashdot, and mentioned on half the blogs I read just moments after discovery, and MS will quickly post something to Windows Update to address the issue.

"I don't know if other playerssuch as Apple's iTunes, AOL's WinAmp, Real's Realplayer, have these features, "

So why the hell are you putting out this article? You obviously are well enough informed and are a disservice to your readers. What ever happened to knowing what one is talking about before one talks. The last Bush press conference is an example.

Melangell

Malengell,

It's not an "article", it is his personal blog, with a lot of opinion, lighten up dude.

You should definitely try iTunes... the new version that just came out (4.5) lets you play a wider variety of files, and the new "Party Shuffle" and old Smart Playlists are reliable and also easy to make and change. I understand your concerns with QuickTime, but iTunes is worlds better... let me know if you try it!

Besides.. ..how come a simple freeware opensource player like the video lan player will play almost any encoding "straight out the box" and wmp pretty much dosen't play anything?

I used to use MusicMatch. It launches with your previous playlist intact and will allow you to preview songs without adding to playlist. I don't miss Musicmatch, but I do miss these 2 features.