by Abigail Abanilla

Created on: August 30, 2009   Last Updated: September 01, 2009

Windows Media Player almost topped my list of best music players. But because of some certain disadvantages, I loved winAmp more.

When I got my first computer, I liked Windows Media Player. It was superb! The best feature for me was the mini mode. When you minimize it, it appears as a miniplaylist on your taskbar which makes it easier for you to choose your favorite songs while surfing the Internet. But as time went by, I noticed that Windows Media Player does not really guarantee the best music/movie experience. It started when I found different movie/music file formats. I played a .mov file, that's a movie file, and Windows Media Player can't play it. Unless, you do something. Click this

link for more information about that.

There was even one time when I tried to play a movie with a weird file format and Windows Media Player asked me to install missing codecs, and I had no idea what it was. For a noob, it was not that user-friendly.

So, I searched the Internet and looked for the right player that could play a .mov file. And then I found this simple VLC from Videolan.org. I was amazed by its memory usage which outruns Windows Media Player. From then on, I kept using VLC for playing all of my favorite movies.

Talking about playing music, WinAmp was pre-installed on my computer. I've been using Windows Media Player when I found this WinAmp program. I tried it and played with the settings, and there's a great feature I fell in love with. Crossfade! WinAmp has this Crossfade feature, which somehow makes me feel, I'm listening to an online radio with no commercials.

There's also another thing with WinAmp which makes it more user-friendly than Windows Media Player. I am a fan of shortcut keys and with Windows Media Player I had to use usually two keys to do something. CTRL+F to go next. But with WinAmp I can only use the letter B to go to the next song and z to go back.

So to sum it all up, here's my list of Windows Media Player disadvantages:

RAM Usage
*compared to VLC - too high
Supported File Formats, compared to VLC
*not that many
Missing Video and Audio Codecs
*compared to VLC and WinAmp - too complicated and not user friendly
No Crossfading
*compared to WinAmp, for me this is a must for all media players

So far, I can still live with WinAmp and VLC. But if Microsoft releases a new Windows Media Player that could support more file formats and will consume less RAM; with pre-installed codecs of all sorts; and with Crossfading, I will definitely be one of the first people to review it. I trust Microsoft. Everyone trusts Microsoft.

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