I really have little right to complain about Windows Media Player as I'm only in the beginning stages of trying to understand it. Jon and Heather gave me a great gift recently: a 40G mp3 player which I plan to integrate into our stereo system as an N-disk CD changer, where N is a very large number. How lazy can you get? But I know I will take much better advantage of our large CD collection when I don't have to go to all the bother of actually replacing the CD in the player. This gift was a delightful surprise, not only because it's something I've been thinking about for a long time but hadn't done anything about, but especially because I didn't have to do the shopping. :)
To my even greater delight, Jon altered the firmware so that I can see the device on my computer directly through Windows Explorer (which, to show my age, I occasionally call "File Manager") instead of through the mediation of Windows Media Player. But I like WMP for playing CD's, so I decided to try to figure out how to use its Library feature.
I haven't tried hard enough to give up yet. But I'm allowing myself to indulge in a grumble: Why does it have to be so non-intuitive? I know I've been spoiled. One used to need to read the manual thoroughly before being able to use software; now the interface is usually so accommodating it takes special effort even to find a manual. I've been able to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft applications pretty much out of the box, so I was expecting more of Media Player.
What I can't get my head around is how it is organized, and how it works. It scans my computer for audio files automatically, thereby picking up all sorts of files I don't want in the Library, but won't allow me to add a specific file manually. If I drag a file from Explorer into WMP, I can't add it directly to the library—it just plays. Somehow the act of playing automatically adds things to the Library, but what a strange way to accomplish a simple task. When I change data from within WMP it seems to change the file sometimes, but not others. I changed the name of an album in WMP, but that change did not affect the name I saw in Explorer, and vice versa. I tried deleting the album from the Library, then adding it again, hoping it would pick up the right name, but that only worked if I checked the option, "Add files previously deleted from Library"—and that picked up the old file name, not the new. And there are other identifiers, such as "genre," which are somehow associated with the file itself—if I copy it manually to the mp3 player, not using the WMP Sync function, the data is there—but I haven't yet figured a way to access (and change) it from Explorer. I think I'd rather use WMP—it has some nice editing features—but don't want to spend a lot of time making changes only to see them undone when I rearrange my files, which is what happened once already.
Oh well, I'm not asking for answers here; I'm going to stumble along in my usual way—though I've already found out that the Help file answers questions I don't have more than questions I do, such as "How can you make something that should be as simple as changing a file and make it so complicated?" No doubt once I'm familiar with the system I'll laugh at my baby steps, but right now it's rather like the first stages of learning Japanese, when I could hardly distinguish one sound from another. I need a "Press 1 for English" button.
