This post was going to be about Zempt 0.3, but as I started to write it, I realised that what I really wanted to write was a rant about Windows Media Player. But why write a rant when you can write a series of rants?
See, I've had it up to here with Windows Media Player. When Version 9 was released, I (like many people) were impressed and enticed by its sparkly glory, and the fact that it was the first release of WMP since version 6 that didn't clearly suck 5 minutes after you started using it.
No, it's taken me a lot longer to discover that WMP9 sucks. Almost exactly 6 months. But now I'm ready to cast it into the dirt, and my carefully organised media library, playlists and ratings along with it. I can see clearly now that I was misled by obvious deceptions. I was a fool. So for the sake of my sanity, here's the first in a series of indeterminate length where I will explain (rant about) the things in WMP9 that really piss me off.
And if anybody knows of a free, elegant, alternative media player that matches the features of WMP9, preferably also doing them properly, I'd like to know.
The rating system
Yay, the rating system! Rate a track anything from 1 to 5 stars, and it'll record your preference, allowing you to make auto-playlists of the tracks you rated highest. What a cool feature, I'm going to rate all my tracks, this will mean I can easily weed out all my bad music! (bounces around gleefully)
Astute readers will see that my error was in making the assumption that the rating system actually worked properly.
The ratings system in WMP9 doesn't work. The tooltips say that if I rate something 1 star, it'll never play again. Is that true at all? Take a wild guess. By my observation, a 1-star rated track plays as frequently as a 5-star rated track, assuming both tracks are in the active playlist. And another thing. Unrated tracks increase their ratings automatically when they are played, whether they were manually selected for play or not. So if you've got a long playlist that you leave running, all the unrated tracks in the playlist will gradually rate their way up to 5 stars, polluting your automatic 'favourites' playlists to the point of near uselessness.
It must take special Microsoft talent to screw up a promising feature this badly. The rating system could so easily have been great. But play with it for long enough and the truth comes out -- it's just a poorly implemented gimmick.