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Up until now I've been using Music Match, mostly because it syncs with my son's Dell Jukebox. Music Match is ok, but the interface is confusing and it crashes often. As we all know, when MS finds a useful application, they wait for everyone else to come up with the cool ideas and then just cut/copy/paste. But for some reason, they can never get it right the first time (or second or third for that matter). In the case of WMP 10, this is really the second iteration of their all-in-one Rip/Burn/Organize/Sync application and for the most part, it's ok. Way better than version 9 (which I didn't even bother loading). After reading that version 10 had advanced portable sync options, I decided to try it out and installed it last night. The interface is fine, less confusing than MM, but still not as clean as iTunes. I pointed it to my music folder and it quickly scanned in all my albums (on a side note, I recently heard that Tivo will rip your cds for $2 each!). Be aware, by default, WMP 10 will start to add additional/missing tag information from Microsoft’s database (this all happens in the background with no indication). Also, if you select an album, right click and select ‘Update Album’, it will overwrite any tags with data from the MS db, and there’s no ‘Are you sure’ message. I’ve yet to try the sync options, but it looks like it can sync songs to a portable based on user defined ratings. This will allow selective loading to the Dell verses the MM ‘all or nothing’ option. So my initial thoughts are; it’s better than Music Match.
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