Windows Media Player vs Winamp vs Itunes
How to improve UI for me.
Media Player:
Let me access the damn CD drive from the Library! What moron blocked the CD/DVD drives from this view? Obviously, no one at Microsoft has ever tried to DJ a party with their player? A DJ has to be able to adjust the playlist without stopping the current music or losing the current playlist. If I pop in a new CD and want to add some songs to the playist, it can’t be done. I can’t even use Windows Exporer to drag a song to the playlist. Fix this.
Also, the library feature just sucks compared to winamp and itunes.
Winamp and Itunes.
One thing MS got right was the seemless movement between video and audio file. I queue up a playlist of music videos and mp3s. Media Player correctly switches between the video to the visualization without switching screens. Itunes and Winamp, Learn from this. Don’t put Visualizations and Video in different windows that conflict with each other. Guess how many times a user wants a video to run in a separate window at the same time as a visualization? Zero.
Winamp and MediaPlayer:
Itunes gives you basic controls in full screen mode without losing full screen mode. This is the correct behavior.
All:
Don’t make the music skip when going from fullscreen to windowed mode. Ever.
Itunes:
Don’t crash the entire program when you import an unknown video file. Winamp and Media Player never crash on importing any of my files. Itunes crashes on several. There’s no excuse for this.
Well hell, I just found the preference in Itunes to give the correct video to visualization option. Nice. Now it just needs to stop crashing when importing my media so that I can actually use it.
btw, here’s a smart feature.
Let’s say I make a playlist, and then the music gets shuffled around on the filesystem. No player can recreate that playlist even though all the music is in the player’s media library. How about a feature to at least try to repair the playlist. It ain’t that hard if you think about it. Not hard at all to get it partially right.