I'm very familiar with WMP and have used it since my first PC I built with Windows 98. I've been told many times over the years to use other players as WMP is garbage... I've tried other players but just don't really like them for one reason or another. I've tried playing music on different players and have never really noticed a difference. Is it just audiopricks stroking their ego because they're beyond the peasants that use WMP or is WMP really not good? I figured Amir could explain as he worked in this area at Microsoft.
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Is Windows Media Player bad for music playback?
- Thread starter IowAudio
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- Thread Starter
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Many of the complaints listed about WMP being slow or a resource hog etc has never been a problem for me, although I've always had good computers... and these days decent usff computers have plenty of power and are cheap. WMP has never been slow to load or search my library either, 200gb of music. Many of the extra features in foobar2k are neat but unnecessary for me and can be a annoying to get setup. I also notice no difference in fidelity, I've always disabled windows sounds, and had a sound card or external DAC. Either way I hope Microsoft keeps WMP. Has anyone else had issue with WMP or have specific reasons to use other media players?
U
UKPI
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Compared to WMP, foobar2000 can be versatile without any charge. Free components made by first and third party developers give you additional DSPs and utilities such as parametric EQ, 31-band graphic EQ, crossfeed, reverb, convolver, pitch shift, playback speed control, ABX comparator, and binary comparator to name a few. Decoders for obscure and less popular formats like shorten can also be installed. Add a free encoder pack and tag manager there and you get an all-in-one audio player/converter that can play most audio formats on the planet and also convert them to some of the popular formats. I see that as the most definitive advantage of foobar2000 against Windows Media Player. I've never heard of WMP being able to do the same with plugins.
In terms of audio quality, I also have never heard the difference. But it would be interesting to read about the technical differences between various players in decoding various audio formats/handling the PCM stream.
In terms of audio quality, I also have never heard the difference. But it would be interesting to read about the technical differences between various players in decoding various audio formats/handling the PCM stream.
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If you are asking regarding performance, unfortunately WMP has no way to bypass the windows audio stack. As a result, your audio can get resampled and subjected to limiting and such. The audibility impact may be zero to minor.
My team developed WMP by the way.
Alas, I have been out of Microsoft getting on 13 years but they have not added any features to it all that time. The group got disbanded when I left, got fragmented with other efforts (e.g. Zune player), etc. It seems to not be a priority for the company to do anything with it.
My team developed WMP by the way.
Alas, I have been out of Microsoft getting on 13 years but they have not added any features to it all that time. The group got disbanded when I left, got fragmented with other efforts (e.g. Zune player), etc. It seems to not be a priority for the company to do anything with it.
