I say almost, because in a perfect world, I should be able to create a playlist, listen to the playlist, interrupt the playlist with an item outside the playlist, and then pickup where I left off when the solitary outsider is finished (think listening to music, interrupting the music to listen to voicemail, and returning to the music when voicemail is finished). There’s almost a solution for player interruption, by clicking the Back button to resume playback of the previous item. A quick access panel makes switching between albums or playlists a snap. The interface takes all the buttons wrapped around Player 9 and organizes them cleanly and sensibly at the top of the UI, not unlike the IE toolbar buttons. Player 10 functionality takes ideas founded in Player 9 and delivers a walloping upgrade, making Windows Media Player a joy to use for the first time since version 6.4 (which is still accessible via the Run command line by typing in mplayer2 and hitting Enter). Number 9 is pretty on the inside, with powerful features, but lacks the finesse of some of its rivals. The interface is a graceful replacement for the ugly stepsister that was/is Player 9. However, Player 9 continues to frustrate me with a convoluted series of buttons haphazardly placed around the perimeter of the main program window. Windows Media 9 Series introduced better media codecs and a generally improved player. While I don’t recommend installing this new player on your primary system (as I have) until it gets closer to official release, there are plenty of reasons to get excited about dramatic improvements to the default media player. In fact, I’ve had fewer issues with the beta of Player 10 than I experience when running Player 9 on the box I use to serve all my media. I’m currently running the Technical Beta build on my laptop, with no serious glitches so far. The Windows Media team released the Technical Beta for Windows Media Player 10 on June 3.
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