One of my biggest pet peeves about Windows Media Player 10 has to do with how it handles its library (the database of all your music). With the older versions of Musicmatch (not the most current version) you could easily create a music library and add it to a portable device (external hard drive, thumb drive, etc.), and still be able to maintain it on the device. So, if I have an external hard drive (one of those megadisks with 160GB), I can store all my mp3s there, along with a library of all the songs I have there. Then, I can copy songs over to my laptop, and have a separate library of songs I have local. Plus, if I want to copy a bunch of songs to another portable device (say my 1GB USB 2.0 Flash drive, or one of the DYI USB 2.0 drives mentioned
here) I can copy them there and create a library for all the stuff I songs on that device. I should be able to load multiple libraries (depending on which external drives I have connected at the moment) and be able to use WMP to shuffle thru both libraries. Shoot, I’d even settle for being able to just choose which library to load. I can’t do any of this with WMP. I use to be able to do this with MusicMatch, but the sort of made it impossible to use this feature in version 10. Am I the only one that does this? I know I’m a musicphile, so I lean towards the more extreme user, but there have to be others out there that do this too. You know that I’m a developer, so I looked into trying to do this myself with .Net, but the documentation on the WMP SDK isn’t all the fun to work with, and is not an object model that I would normally use in my day job (plus, it is still an ActiveX control, not .Net, so you got to deal with COM interop, not something one would want to do in their spare time. You can check out the MSDN documentation for .Net
here). So, here’s a shout out to
Scoble and
Dare to help make WMP a much better piece of software. I don’t want WMP to take control of my portable devices (like iTunes does), I just want to use WMP with portable devices, and still have control over them (like I do without WMP).