Digital Home Thoughts: I've Got CPU Cores to Spare...Why Won't Somebody Use 'Em Smarter?

I was synchronizing music over to my SanDisk Sansa Clip today, and I configured Windows Media Player 11 to transcode the music to 128 kbps WMA files from the original 256 to 320 kbps music files. 128 kbps WMA files still sound pretty good for rock/pop music, and at the gym sound fidelity isn't quite as critical as is it at home. What surprised me was how poorly the Windows Media Encoder used my multiple cores. It did better than some programs because it was using two cores to transcode a single MP3 file, but what it should have been doing is multi-threaded encoding, where one core is assigned the task of transcoding one file, and have all four CPU cores transcoding the audio. Just like using FTP to download a bunch of files, even if you have restricted bandwidth or CPU cycles, efficiencies can be gained by processing multiple files in parallel.