Digital Home Thoughts: Picture Walk-Through of Windows Media Player 11

Paul Thurrott has published a whack of pictures from the upcoming Windows Media Player 11 release. They're all in JPEG and a bit over-compressed, but it still gives you a good overview of the player and some of the new features. The one thing you'll notice as you click on the pictures is the lack of horizontal scroll bars everywhere. That's one of my pet peeves with WMP10, it was far too scroll-licious. You'll also notice stacking of multiple items based on metadata, such as what year the album was released. They seem to have integrated the Windows Media Connect client in some way, and the pictures interface has been cleaned up.

What I'm really curious about though is if they're changed the way WMP discovers new music and changes in music. That's a huge pain point for me, and likely many others. Here's an example: today I fired up my Media Center Edition 2005 to listen to some music. I went into the genre filter, and noticed that my metadata was screwed up: I had one category called "A Capella" and another called "A Capella A Capella". So I exited out from MCE, fired up Media Monkey (an awesome tagging program) and fixed my metadata. I fired up MCE again, and of course it had all the old metadata still. Why? Because it relies on Windows Media Player 10 for the catalog of song data, and I first would need to start up WMP10, press F3, let it scan all 9000 songs to see what's new (that takes about 5 minutes), then exit WMP10, and finally start up MCE2005 to see the updated information.

Am I the only one who thinks something is fundamentally screwed up here?