windows media player 9.0 unspeakable evils
 

I happened upon a new feature in version 9.0. You can rate your music, default is 4 stars. Play your mp3s for a while and then look at the file modified date/time. I was shocked to see that my mp3s were being modified without my knowledge. Since when the hell does microsoft have a right to be changing any file I play using their player? Are they trying to keep track of my mp3 collection for me? What else are they conveniently putting in there besides a rating? To me, this represents the death of the windows media player product line. It was bad before and now its worse, but this was the last straw. I wouldnt have been using it if it werent for winamp being so buggy. I'm looking for alternatives. In the mean time I uninstalled the hell out of it under add/remove windows components and while I was at it I took out msn explorer and msn messenger. good riddance.

You clicked okay to the EULA.

Yeah, apparently I need to slow down when I am installing stuff, because I always seem to miss something important.:o

and one more thing

it is defaulty set to download info about the music from the net.


also, it downloads jpeg's that show the pic's of the artist and the album and dled it to the folder.

i was like where the fuck did these come from?

I find all that stuff cool, but as they said above, you can choose yes or no during installation or even after.

Re: windows media player 9.0 unspeakable evils
 

Check out MusicMatch!

If you have a filewall just get it to block wmplayer.exe... then again I guess that'll block streams too...

My 2 cents. Mediaplayer on Mac won't even play 1/2 of the streaming video I try to view. I kept checking for updates, eventually got bored. Realplayer and Quicktime work fine for me. I may be missing something, but my opinion is "Fuck mediaplayer!" It hasn't been worth the free download!

I've installed WMP9, but only for the codec. For all my music-listening needs, I break out the old reliable WinAmp. And for everything else, there's Media Player Classic.

With the Winamp Album List plugin, I have instant easy access to every single artist and album, without have to dig through files. This plugin is the best thing since sliced bread.

I don't know why anybody would use WMP for this...

and codec downloads.

Re: windows media player 9.0 unspeakable evils
 

Forget Winamp 3, it tends to be buggy and the playback quality is not as good as Winamp 2. Actually Winamp 2.91 is very stable and I'd be suprised if you had problems with it. Also you may want to check out a decent winamp alternative:

http://www.foobar2000.com/

/bisc

if you dont care about fancy skins and all that extra crap, just want a player to make the sounds and sound good doing it, get coolplayer


bonus, really small ram footprint