WMP10 Library
Bugs & Irritations
(Many also apply to
WMP9 and (*) have been reported in betas for either or both player versions).
1.
Crashes when
bulk-updating some fields in the Now Playing list esp. Album Artist and
Composer (happens frequently, but not always)
2.
*Doesn’t reliably split
semicolon-delimited artist or composer string fields into separate tokens
3.
*Cannot correct
semi-colon errors by editing the node directly
4.
*Cannot jump to artist,
album or composer from Now Playing tracks (in Library or Now
Playing panes).
5.
*Cannot jump to artist
from album track listings.
6.
Jump to Artist is actually Jump to Album Artist
7.
Album name sorting is
awkward in some cases e.g. “The Sea II” comes before “The Sea”
8.
Genre “A Cappella”
should not be sorted as though the “A” were an (ignorable) English indefinite
article. It *is* sorted correctly in the Genre list in the Advanced Tag Editor (which of course has a different set of canned genres listed than in the Album Wizard).
9.
*WMP does not honour
file-size limits for MIDI or image files
10.
*WMP folder monitoring
does not distinguish music/movie folders from image folders so you end up with
Event nodes for each album’s art plus any images in web page thickets mixed in
with “real” pictures. I have thousands of pictures with caption label “folder”
“AlbumArtSmall” etc
11.
*Pictures can’t be rated
12.
Uploading album data
causes ratings to be lost for that album
13.
Uploading individual
track data through Find Album Wizard deletes local track Composer data (and
possibly other fields)
14.
*Auto-complete entries
are almost useless, either completely ignoring recent text entries or using
inappropriate entries from other field data-types. (What use is an auto-complete
function for track number? It just slows down editing multiple tracks as I
cannot arrow down from a “1” entry because it wants to offer me “10”, “11” etc
as alternate entries.)
15.
*Dates consistently
wrong by a year or more + altered by a year after being entered.
16.
*Does not retain
sort-orders
17.
If you drag tracks
between two Album nodes with the same Album Title, then WMP asks for
confirmation to change the Album Title, when it should ask to change the
Album Artist.
18.
*Cannot rate tracks in a
playlist or Now Playing.
19.
*Cannot edit some nodes:
e.g. “Nils Petter Molvaer” cannot be changed to or merged with “Nils Petter
Molvær”
20.
*2nd-level
icon for Contributing artist is wrong: uses Album Artist icon (head on top of
disk, rather than reverse)
21.
*Cannot directly sort playlists
by drag-and-drop: must open a separate playlist edit window.
22.
*The short list of
playlists showed in the Add To context menu never changes. It does not
show the most recent playlist created or edited. When you choose the Additional
Playlists dialog, it always defaults to the alphabetically last playlist,
rather than the last one added.
23.
*AMG default genres do
not match those in WMP. (Actually this is the tip of the iceberg regarding
genre inconsistencies and errors with online data).
24.
*No Undo
25.
Columns are not added
near the column under the cursor
26.
Some JPEGs cannot be displayed in WMP, although they can be handled by Windows Picture Viewer and Office 2003 Picture Manager.
27.
*Cannot search into Composer field. I actually thought this had been fixed in v10, but it turns out it was sometimes picking this information up from the File Path. In order to search into Composer field, you have to set up an Auto Playlist with one of the criteria set appropriately. [added 2004-11-10]
28.
*Due to the lousy script code used for uploading albums, one of the consequences of the script failing, is that you can end up with album data successfully uploaded but without your data transferred to your local tracks. [added 2004-11-10]
29.
*Gross inconsistencies between the available viewable/editable fields and the Advanced Tag Editor offering, means that you cannot do things like show the BPM (Beats Per Minute) data [added 2004-11-10]
30.
The "Add played tracks to the library" option seems to have some some of built-in delay. I generally find that such tracks do not appear in the library under respective Artist/Album/Composer nodes until the day after I've played them. [added 2004-11-10]
31.
*If you drag tracks from one composer node to another, and the destination node has an ampersand in the name (e.g. "Sonny & Cher"), then the confirmation dialog substitutes an underscore. This is a novice-level C programming bug due to not escaping the ampersand. [added 2004-11-10]
32.
Certain updates to Composer fields such as fixing tokenization to semi-colons is not written into the data-files, so when you rebuild/rescan your library these fields revert to uncorrected state [added 2004-11-10]
33.
The "Find Album Info" feature is available from the Media Information sub-pane of Now Playing pane, but is greyed out when trying to access it from the list above it, or from either of the Now Playing lists in the Library pane. Even then it's a roll of the dice as to whether you'll get anything other than a mostly blank pane without any kind of status message. I say "mostly" because there are two bits of functional UI - a very small "Back" button, and a much larger blue button that does nothing but return an error message about the lack of a security certificate. Seems kinda weird to make a completely useless piece of UI bigger than the only working piece. [added 2004-11-11]
34.
If you create an auto-playlist using multiple criteria, then you may get multiple instances of some tracks returned if they fulfil multiple criteria. I set up one that would return tracks for Vangelis as Contributing Artist, and also as Composer. For every track where a match was recorded in both fields, I got two items in the playlist. A database filter should not return multiple hits of a single record. [added 2004-11-12]
35.
Now Playing pane only uses first Contributing Artist[added 2004-12-11]
36.
*"Group by Sorted Field" feature basically makes most of library unreadable. WMP colour customizations cannot be previewed with library open, so it's very tedious yo get this looking right.[added 2004-12-11]
37.
*"Sorting "Artist" field in library by clicking column header only applies to first artist (i.e. up to first semi-colon), so you can't use it to distinguish different sets of artists. [added 2005-2-22]
38.
* Media Exporter plug-in only exports a subset of library fields. It (like other features noted above) also ignores additional artists listed in the [Contributing] Artist field, so it is not a complete nor reliable method of backing up or extracting library data [added 2005-2-22]
39.
"Find Album Info" may return a different album record for your data than "View album Info". For example Antony and the Johnsons' EP "The Lake" returns a user-uploaded record in the first instance, and a full album listing with label/release data and album art in the 2nd case. This is repro'd consistently even after re-looking up the album information to get the more complete data record associated with the local tracks. [added 2005-2-22]
40.
Album art displayed as the visualization in Now Playing pane is not resized for viewing if the art is larger than the pane - the art is clipped. Not great for those who have taken the trouble to do good quality scans of album art [added 2005-2-24]
41.
Now Playing list in Library is empty despite one or more tracks being displayed in the Now Playing Pane [added 2005-3-13]
42.
If you rip a new copy of an album, then WMP will move the tracks previously ripped from into the same folder as the newly ripped tracks. The old folder is deleted - even if it had a different name. ( All rename & rearrange options turned off. Old files were MP3, newer were lossless WMA. Repro'd multiple times) [added 2005-3-13]
43.
WMP cannot read Duration tag from some MP3 headers even though every bit of freeware/payware shareware media software has no difficulty, and the files were ripped with WMP. Playing the files in WMP does *not* update the tags as Microsoft claimed. Consequence: files cannot be burnt to audio CD. Lengthy workaround: rebuild tags with Winamp. [added 2005-3-13]
44.
Ampersand escaping error in the Album title "button" near the top right of Now Playing pane. Shows as underscore. (Similar issue in #31) [added 2005-3-20]
45.
If you create a burn-list, with play-length longer than an audio CD, but change the output to Data CD, WMP does not notice and still maintains the extra files will not fit, and will only burn the first 80mins of complete tracks to the CD. To fix, you have to set the output before creating the burn list. [added 2005-3-27]
Reported by
others
1.
Cannot turn off metadata
tool-tips
2.
Duplication of top-level
album-nodes [I've seen this now]. I also get occasional duplication of individual tracks (i.e. file path is identical)
3.
Unable to scan for
any/all media tracks. Scanning stops before examining all folders on a drive.