New Features (Continued)

Choice of Devices

Microsoft designed WMP10 from the ground up with devices in mind. Whether you already have a device or you are in the market for a new one, WMP10 includes features to help you get more from it. You can check out more than 70 portable music players that support online music services and work with WMP10. You can even take your whole library with you on new Portable Media Center devices.

• Optimized with Auto Sync

  Now, you can choose either manually or automatically sync your portable device. After you set up Auto Sync once, everytime you plug in your device, fire up your WMP10, and it will make sure your device gets filled up with the list of music you have compiled. One thing I'm wondering though is that, what if your music player has a smaller capacity than the list you made. Will it be filled up accordingly and stopped when it's full? And will it be filled in descending order from the top of the list to the bottom just like copying files to a removable media? Or it will display a message telling the user that the space is not enough? Too bad, I can't test this feature myself as I'm not rich enough to own a music player.

  Nonetheless, this will be a nice feature for lucky owners of hard disk-based protable music players.

  If your portable device supports MTP (Microsoft Transfer Protocol) which most do I think or mass storage device, then your device will act like a removable drive where no driver installation is needed (if you are using Windows XP) . Just plug in and start transfering!

  If you have a portable device that allows you to rate the music files in it, you can use Auto Sync to send back the files using WMP10 when you connect your device to your computer. This means Auto Sync is bidirectional. This is cool.

  With the new revamped library, you can manually sync more directly to your portable device. It's easier with the library because you can create various categories for your music and the files can be organized easily and in a more meaningful way too. Everything can be done by dragging and dropping, one of my favourite feature in Windows. Furthermore, there will be status indicators at the bottom of the player so you can monitor the sync status.

  I didn't try this feature out either. Ok, let's move on to something I did try out...

Smart Jukebox Features

• Auto Ratings and Playlists

  I’ve never tried the library feature of any players until today. But I was quite impressed with the way WMP10’s library scanned through my MP3 folder. It even sorted them according to the artist's name.
  
  Well, it actually depends on what’s in the MP3 tag. If you did not add any tags and merely named them like this - [01] BoA, [02] BoA, etc; then you are out of luck. WMP10 will think that they are from different artists and separate them into different album "artists". You’ll have to manually change the tag of the songs to correct this.

• Monitor Changes to Your Digital Media Collection Automatically
  When you set the library to monitor a certain folder in the Monitor Folders dialog box (the button at the bottom left), it will indeed check whether you have added, deleted, renamed or removed files from the folder. It will update the library automatically to reflect the changes. This is pretty neat IMHO.

• Organize Your Digital Media by Ratings
  WMP10 will automatically rate your collection of music files by the number of times you listen to them and by monitoring your habit of listening to certain songs. The more frequently a certain song is played, the higher its rating will be from a scale of 1 to 5 stars. You can rate your favourite songs manually too.

• Play, Sync, or Burn Digital Media Quickly with Auto Playlists
  By default, WMP10 comes with 15 auto playlists. They are where your collection of songs will be sorted automatically, from your highly-rated songs to the songs you listen to at night to one CD’s worth of tracks ready to burn for the road. You can add more playlists too. With these lists, you can easily play back your favourite songs on your computer, sync to a device or burn into a CD.

• Search Feature
  There is now a search feature which will search through all your music files in the library. It will search through the information in the tag of each music file. But only certain fields in the tag are included in the search. But don't worry. As long as you are searching for the artist's name, song's title or album's title, then this search feature will do the job just fine.