I know, me saying stuff like that (my co-workers would be having a fit now… me liking another Microsoft product). But it’s true. The libraries new feature in this version is how it shows information. It groups songs by artist, then by album, with cover art and album details. It’s great to quickly run through a music library quickly.

I don’t know about iTunes, it has this same view (copy?) but it is slow and terrible so I’ve never had a chance to play with it.

My friends have said that making a playlist is so hard in WMP. But it’s a breeze as far as I can tell. I pop open the playlist editor (the arrow button next to the search box). I then just drag and drop stuff. If I want a single song, I drag that onto the list. Shift and Ctrl selections also work, just as in previous versions.

But here’s where the new view comes into play. I want all songs by an artist? I drag the artists name into the playlist. I want to add a CD? I drag the CD cover onto the list. Alternatively, if I just want to play that artist or album, I double click instead.

I do have some gripes with WMP11 though. For one, having no gap-killer is getting to me. I also like my cross fade, but WMP’s one is just crap. I’m also an avid user of Winamp’s Jump menu (if you don’t know - you press J in Winamp and it’ll pop up a searchable list of all songs in the current playlist, makes it a snap to play the song that is on your mind). Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these features, or shall I just get Winamp again?

iTunes is OK, I must admit. But recent versions have become pretty terrible. Cover-flow is slow and unusable on Windows (at least on my computer which has a decent graphics card) and, as mentioned, iTunes’ version of the WMP11 expanded view is slow to navigate as well.