I don’t think I’ll go for Winamp if I have to break wmp11 and songbird now out of the question based off all the bugs I keep reading about. I used to use Mediamonkey and may give it another go in the future, and Foobar seems logical on a usb drive. But…
I do appreciate the simplicity that WMP brings, ironically enough. I have the view just the way I want it. It’s song view which I have seperated by Artist and I’ve put Album Artist vs. Contributingh Artist to good use for bands like Nine Inch Nails with so many albums (halos) so I’ll do (halo 1 - NIN, halo -2 - NIN; and further divide parts of albums as appropriate). For all in one bucket of fav hits, the album is <my name> contributing artists <actual artist’s name>. This coupled with the ability have transparency of star ratings between my wm5 smartphone and wmp11 as well as 4 and 5 star playlists for my clip works really well for my way of thinking. I top that off with CD Art Display which works well with wmp11 and it’s rating system (and supposedly other players) with the bonus of on the fly automatic shuffles (like iTunes). Lastly, I really like the compliment of DirectShow filters comes in handy from time to time as well when I’m not using Zoom Player or Media Center Player, for whatever reason and I want GPU mpeg2 decoding or CoreAVC mpe4 decoding (although it is certainly lacking the advanced features of zp). I do wish that WMP11 had the ability to sort albums by artist, then year - like iTunes but I’m told WinAmp cannot do this either. I’ve also told that the new playing song in the library of Winamp is not highlighted which is a bummer for me. Also, it was a few months ago in another forum that I frequent that you can’t have compilation albums displayed correctly in WinAmp… is this true?! I hate when there’s 14 different artist sections for one freakin album which is where again, ‘contributing artist column’ comes into play for me in wmp11. the icing on the cake is seeing the black clip thumbnail .ico while in wmp.
BTW, here’s a pic of my setup to illustrate my talking points.
WMP11 library song/icon view (showing dilineation betwen Album Artist and Contributing Artist)
CD Art Display on Desktop with the WMP11 Rating System accessible from here as well
Full Size showing the Clip icon within WMP11 (click link as the board doesn’t seem to allow me to insert a clickable thumbnail)
WMP11 Library view with Clip Icon
Message Edited by hakujin on 05-29-2008 01:38 PM
