Digital Home Thoughts: Initial Thoughts on WMP 10

I'm just playing with WMP10, and so far I like it - they don't seem to have changed that much from the technical beta, but it looks more polished. They've given it a new skin - the library is now easier to read. I can't seem to find a way to remove some of the presets for sorting - I only care about sorting by artist, not "Contributing Artist" and "Composer". I think in terms of two parameters - ALBUM and ARTIST. I don't need to be confused by showing other sort options. It still starts up showing nothing but an empty blue window - why not start up showing the Library? Or the Guide? I still see too many scrollbars as well for song information that can't fit in the window. There's a Purchased Music filter, which works well with Napster, although I wish there was a way to filter that data.

Things with Napster are finally working for me as well - I ran into a problem where I tried to download an update and the installer got locked in a cycle where, every time I loaded WMP, it would try to install, but the install would never continue because it would complain about WMP running (it wasn't - I even killed it in the task manager). At any rate, this new version of WMP allowed me to finally fix the problem. I was able to sign up for Napster's subscription service, and at the moment I'm groovin' to Jimi Hendrix playing live at the Isle of Wight.

The library still doesn't work the way I want it to - the logic is hard-wired into thinking that everyone has all of their music, photos, and videos located on the local hard drive and nowhere else. I want to be able to right-click on PICTURES, MUSIC, TV, and VIDEO, and tell it exactly where the folders are that it should monitor, and the parameters around that monitoring. I know you can set up folder monitoring under a different interface, but it's clumsy. Let's hope folder monitoring actually works this time, unlike the beta or version 9.