Calum ([info]zootm) wrote,
@ 2007-05-30 15:53:00
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Dear me.
I haven't gone for it in previous incarnations, but I'm using version 11 of Windows Media Player at work and it's totally awesome. I often feel horrid going home to Banshee, and if I was using Windows at home, it'd be a serious competitor to foobar2000, which was my previous player of choice.

iTunes is pretty neat these days as well, but it's never gelled well with me on Windows.

Edit:
Things that are awesome include a very nice layout, very simple seamless ripping support (to MP3, rather than WMA, o'course), and (and this is my favourite thing, which is the main reason I dislike Banshee et al compared to Foobar/iTunes), correct handling of the distinction between "album artist" and "artist", and other tags. Compilation albums are a complete pain on most Linux music players.

Also I clicked the "Advanced Tag Editor" and it has built-in support for syncing lyrics to the music in the tags of the file. Not something I'd ever use, but really quite neat.

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[info]binaryhero
2007-05-30 03:06 pm UTC (link)
I use it for video, because it's just good, it does everything I want a video player to do, and it looks really nice on vista. I'm still using Foobar for music though, because searching is faster than WMP11 and I'm not sure if I can enqueue stuff with WMP.

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[info]kurisu
2007-05-30 04:01 pm UTC (link)

I found the WMP11 interface a bit confusing last time I tried it, but then I didn't try it for long.

The current version of Banshee suffers hugely from the lack of a browser view at the moment. I've seen mockups of the new browser view, which isn't quite as groundbreaking as they seem to think it is, but hey. It brings it up to standard.

It also seems to be lacking in metadata. One example I can think of is that a lot of my albums come on more than one disc, and iTunes lets me specify both the track and disc number. Banshee just lumps them together.

You're right about iTunes, there's something about it on Windows that isn't right. Not even just to do with the user interface. I could swear it's less stable than on the Mac.

And speaking of iTunes and metadata, iTunes really has the feel of a music app that's had a whole load of video functionality dumped in it without much thought. Of particular annoyance to me is that you can edit stuff such as title, artist, album, genre etc. in bulk, but you can only edit TV show title, series, episode number one by one.

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[info]zootm
2007-05-30 04:05 pm UTC (link)
It's definitely less stable on Windows, yeah. Judging by the farce surrounding them getting it working on Vista, I'd say it's a fair bet that it's much the same thing that made WMP for Mac suck so much; the engineers simply do not understand the other operating system. They've hooked into low-level stuff that they have no good reason to be fiddling with.

I'm wondering how hard Banshee is to extend. I'd really quite like to add in some better metadata support, at least.

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[info]kurisu
2007-05-30 04:29 pm UTC (link)

It should be easy, as one of its trumpeted features is its plugin architecture, which is used to provide most of its features as it is I think.

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[info]turtel
2007-05-30 07:50 pm UTC (link)
No, I think the plugin architecture is quite limited in terms of what it can do underneath, the UI on the other hand is well exposed through the plugins...

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