I've always had a bit of a love/hate thing with Windows Media Player. A few years ago I hated it for becoming bloatware that demanded all the resources on your system, including screen space.
Nowadays I quite like the way version 11 presents itself. It's much lighter on resources these days too. It's become quite good for organising and playing music.
The one thing that continues to cause me consternation is the way Media Player syncs with MP3 players. Lets take an example scenario - like many people you have a large MP3 collection on your computer which is 30Gb or more. Plenty for when you're at home. You also have an MP3 player and it is maybe 4Gb or 8Gb as you value portability over capacity. You want to choose some music to take with you, so you could drag and drop in Windows Explorer if your player supports it. Fair enough. But lets say Media Player happens to be running. Oh look, it says to itself, here's a new device for me to sync with. Good old Media Player will immediately go ahead and do that. But what's this, media player can't fit any more music onto it - better tell the idiot user they should have got a larger capacity by displaying a "player full" message or something. And Media Player will happily make the assumption that you want your entire "Pictures" (or "My Pictures") folder on the device as well. So can I as the mere user tell Media Player what I want to do?
No. You can't set it to sync only a subset of your music. You can't choose what music goes on your player. You can't even tell it not to sync your pictures folder.
I'm left to assume that iTunes is somewhat more common sense, though I've never installed it as I don't want Apple foisting other software on me by stealth through it. No, I'm hoping that Songbird http://getsongbird.com/ (currently still in development) will one day be good enough to make my MP3 player sing.
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