WMP 11 Title and Artist not displayed.

[Ted.]

HI, All,

On my WMP 10 the Song title and artist were displayed in large letters on
the top left-hand side of the screen as a music file was played. Has this
function been discontinued in WMP 11?

[Dale]

You call those "large" letters? Even in WMP10 they were too small to be
useful so there wasn't much loss when they took them out of WMP11. Even the
size of the artist and track name in WMP 10 was one of the biggest drivers to
make me write my own interface for WMP.

The whole Album Art visualization in WMP 10 and 11 is a waste since WMP will
limit you to a 200x200 pixel image centered in a large wasteland of screen
space.

A visualization is useless while you're doing other work at the pc - it will
be covered up. So where it is most useful is if you're up from the pc,
across the room or the house. They should have at least followed the Media
Center standard by making the track name and artist name readable from 10
feet away.

Hopefully, WMP 11.5 will have it back and have it back in a size that makes
it useful and readable even for people who don't sit at the computer desk
staring blankly at visualizations while listening to music.
--
Dale Preston
MCAD C#
MCSE, MCDBA

Post by Ted.
HI, All,
On my WMP 10 the Song title and artist were displayed in large letters on
the top left-hand side of the screen as a music file was played. Has this
function been discontinued in WMP 11?

[Ted.]

Hi there, Dale,

Many thanks for your reply and I agree wholeheartedly with your comments. My
Album Art display size has been even more reduced since I increased my Screen
Resolution to 1024 x 768. I now have a 2.5 x 2.5 inch picture with a ton of
waste space around it. I resized some of my Album Art files to 365 x 365
pixels and embedded them using the Avanced Tag editor. This works perfectly
and gives me a five-inch-square picture, but I've struck problems as I can't
delete old Album Art content on protected WMA files.
What features have you emplyed on the interface you've written?

Post by Ted.
HI, All,
On my WMP 10 the Song title and artist were displayed in large letters on
the top left-hand side of the screen as a music file was played. Has this
function been discontinued in WMP 11?

[Dale]

What I wanted was a simple way to see what was playing from across the room.
I tried Media Center 2005 and several other options including album art
visualizations. None of them gave a reasonable presentation.

So, I wrote one that runs full screen with a solid background. It displays
a 480x480 picture (I scanned all my 650+ covers to get the images) centered
with large text to show the album name, artist name, and track name. That's
all there is. If you move the mouse or hit the associated keys, a custom
panel with media player controls shows and goes away after 5 seconds of no
activity. All the buttons are minimalized to match the effect overall - no
fancy silver background and buttons like the one in Media Center. If you
click the Restore button the window reduces to about 600x300 or so - not
resizable since the features take a certain amount of space - and the image
is reduced to 240x240.

And reducing to get the smaller image is the way to go. Media Center takes
the 200x200 image and stretches it to somewhere around 375x375 or so - I
don't remember the exact number - which always gives a distorted image. And
second to the album art in Media Center, the next largest user interface
object in the album art is the track number of all things. As if the thing
most important to users, after the album art, is the track number!

I didn't want fancy visualizations, and I didn't want a media player with
controls that try to emulate my car stereo or my home stereo. This is a pc,
not one of those other devices. Why dumb it down to one of those through
emulation?

For selecting what to play, a small window pops up to allow me to select
from an existing WMP playlist. This is the part I am working on changing now
because the library functionality is so bad in WMP 11.
--
Dale Preston
MCAD C#
MCSE, MCDBA

Post by Ted.
Hi there, Dale,
Many thanks for your reply and I agree wholeheartedly with your comments. My
Album Art display size has been even more reduced since I increased my Screen
Resolution to 1024 x 768. I now have a 2.5 x 2.5 inch picture with a ton of
waste space around it. I resized some of my Album Art files to 365 x 365
pixels and embedded them using the Avanced Tag editor. This works perfectly
and gives me a five-inch-square picture, but I've struck problems as I can't
delete old Album Art content on protected WMA files.
What features have you emplyed on the interface you've written?

Post by Ted.
HI, All,
On my WMP 10 the Song title and artist were displayed in large letters on
the top left-hand side of the screen as a music file was played. Has this
function been discontinued in WMP 11?

[Ted.]

Hi, Dale,

Sounds great. Looks like you're well on the way to achieving the ideal setup.
Once it's perfected you may want to offer it as a WMP patch and beat WMP
11.5 to the punch!

Post by Dale
What I wanted was a simple way to see what was playing from across the room.
I tried Media Center 2005 and several other options including album art
visualizations. None of them gave a reasonable presentation.
So, I wrote one that runs full screen with a solid background. It displays
a 480x480 picture (I scanned all my 650+ covers to get the images) centered
with large text to show the album name, artist name, and track name. That's
all there is. If you move the mouse or hit the associated keys, a custom
panel with media player controls shows and goes away after 5 seconds of no
activity. All the buttons are minimalized to match the effect overall - no
fancy silver background and buttons like the one in Media Center. If you
click the Restore button the window reduces to about 600x300 or so - not
resizable since the features take a certain amount of space - and the image
is reduced to 240x240.
And reducing to get the smaller image is the way to go. Media Center takes
the 200x200 image and stretches it to somewhere around 375x375 or so - I
don't remember the exact number - which always gives a distorted image. And
second to the album art in Media Center, the next largest user interface
object in the album art is the track number of all things. As if the thing
most important to users, after the album art, is the track number!
I didn't want fancy visualizations, and I didn't want a media player with
controls that try to emulate my car stereo or my home stereo. This is a pc,
not one of those other devices. Why dumb it down to one of those through
emulation?
For selecting what to play, a small window pops up to allow me to select
from an existing WMP playlist. This is the part I am working on changing now
because the library functionality is so bad in WMP 11.
--
Dale Preston
MCAD C#
MCSE, MCDBA

Post by Ted.
Hi there, Dale,
Many thanks for your reply and I agree wholeheartedly with your comments. My
Album Art display size has been even more reduced since I increased my Screen
Resolution to 1024 x 768. I now have a 2.5 x 2.5 inch picture with a ton of
waste space around it. I resized some of my Album Art files to 365 x 365
pixels and embedded them using the Avanced Tag editor. This works perfectly
and gives me a five-inch-square picture, but I've struck problems as I can't
delete old Album Art content on protected WMA files.
What features have you emplyed on the interface you've written?

Post by Ted.
HI, All,
On my WMP 10 the Song title and artist were displayed in large letters on
the top left-hand side of the screen as a music file was played. Has this
function been discontinued in WMP 11?

[jtpryan]

Post by Dale
What I wanted was a simple way to see what was playing from across the room.
I tried Media Center 2005 and several other options including album art
visualizations. None of them gave a reasonable presentation.
So, I wrote one that runs full screen with a solid background. It displays
a 480x480 picture (I scanned all my 650+ covers to get the images) centered
with large text to show the album name, artist name, and track name. That's
all there is. If you move the mouse or hit the associated keys, a custom
panel with media player controls shows and goes away after 5 seconds of no
activity. All the buttons are minimalized to match the effect overall - no
fancy silver background and buttons like the one in Media Center. If you
click the Restore button the window reduces to about 600x300 or so - not
resizable since the features take a certain amount of space - and the image
is reduced to 240x240.
And reducing to get the smaller image is the way to go. Media Center takes
the 200x200 image and stretches it to somewhere around 375x375 or so - I
don't remember the exact number - which always gives a distorted image. And
second to the album art in Media Center, the next largest user interface
object in the album art is the track number of all things. As if the thing
most important to users, after the album art, is the track number!
I didn't want fancy visualizations, and I didn't want a media player with
controls that try to emulate my car stereo or my home stereo. This is a pc,
not one of those other devices. Why dumb it down to one of those through
emulation?
For selecting what to play, a small window pops up to allow me to select
from an existing WMP playlist. This is the part I am working on changing now
because the library functionality is so bad in WMP 11.
--
Dale Preston
MCAD C#
MCSE, MCDBA

Post by Ted.
Hi there, Dale,
Many thanks for your reply and I agree wholeheartedly with your comments. My
Album Art display size has been even more reduced since I increased my Screen
Resolution to 1024 x 768. I now have a 2.5 x 2.5 inch picture with a ton of
waste space around it. I resized some of my Album Art files to 365 x 365
pixels and embedded them using the Avanced Tag editor. This works perfectly
and gives me a five-inch-square picture, but I've struck problems as I can't
delete old Album Art content on protected WMA files.
What features have you emplyed on the interface you've written?

Post by Ted.
HI, All,
On my WMP 10 the Song title and artist were displayed in large letters on
the top left-hand side of the screen as a music file was played. Has this
function been discontinued in WMP 11?

Gonna share this? Want a beta tester??

-Jim