What Happened to Advanced Tag Editor?

October 6, 2009 Note: You might have noticed that this blog article was changed from the original version. Upon the objection of someone I quoted in the original article, I removed the quote along with any text that would imply the quote. Otherwise, the content remains the same. Thank you for your understanding of this minor edit.

Now that I've had a few hours to play with Windows Media Player 12 in Windows 7, I am finding more silly changes.

I blogged previously on the laughable album art craziness in Windows Media Player 12. Album art has been a big part of my Media Player tool development effort so that was the first thing I looked at.

In working through that blog post, and testing Windows Media Player 12 afterward, I have found a lot of other changes that I think are nearly as bad as the album art changes.

As I have said before, I think that the "Now Playing" feature in Windows Media Player has been severely broken since Windows Media Player 10 began trying to limit displayed album art to 200x200 pixels. As loophole after loophole appears to be closed to using large or high quality custom album art, using WMP for playing music has become less and less attractive.

So, what was left? Well, one thing Windows Media Player did pretty well was manage your media library. Now it wasn't great - the library was bulky, slow, prone to corruption and failure but it worked. And it worked well enough that I abandoned previous efforts to write my own library and tag editor for MP3 files.

Since managing my media library was the one thing left for which I used the WMP user interface and now that has been eliminated, then what's left that is good about Media Player - other than it plays media?

Why in the world would the Windows Media Player product team eliminate Advanced Tag Editor? The code was already written and it worked. There was more cost to remove it than to keep it. All so they can make you edit how they want you to edit? By adding a multitude of columns to the grid display in Windows Media Player 12? Do they think that having to scroll way off to the right to be able to edit all the things that might need editing is better than a multi-tabbed window form?

I tried adding all the user editable columns to the display in the Songs list and in a Playlist list. In both cases, to edit past my 22 inch monitor's width you have to scroll way to the right. As you scroll to the right there are no fixed columns that identify which track you're editing. You have to continuously scroll to the left to find out what's next or where you are. The Advanced Tag Editor simply does not have this problem - especially in WMP 10 and previous where there was a list of which tracks you were editing.

Editing multiple data items across multiple tracks was intuitive and painless with Advanced Tag Editor. With Windows Media Player 12, it is neither intuitive or painless. And many of the fields that you could edit in Advanced Tag Editor cannot be edited at all in Windows Media Player 12.

To edit an attribute for a track in WMP 12, you have to click the track once to select it, then pause, and then click the item to edit. This puts the item in edit mode. If you don't pause long enough, though, then WMP 12 treats it as a double-click - usually resulting in playing the track. See the next bullet about editing in playlists for more on how bad this is.

Viewing and playing playlists is another new flaw. When you select a playlist, it displays the contents in the center of the library and you can edit the track information for tracks in that playlist. Try that select-pause-click to edit trick I described above and you will often end up having double-clicked the playlist item causing the playlist to play.

So what's wrong with that, you ask? Well, that's the sixty-four thousand dollar question. The answer is that when you play the playlist, suddenly the list goes to the Play tab on the right of the WMP window and you can't edit the tracks at all. Instead, in the center section, where the editing takes place, you get this message:

You are currently playing this list. You can edit the list in the Play tab.

Problem is, you can't edit anything except the list itself; you can't edit the track. This is more reason that removing the Advanced Tag Editor, seems so wrong. This problem simply did not exist when editing in Advanced Tag Editor.

As Windows Media Player continues on the track of more flash, more marketing, more DRM, and less function and less quality, I feel comfortable predicting the day when third-party media players begin to seriously threaten Microsoft's hold on the media player market the way FireFox (upon which I am typing this post) threatens Internet Explorer's hold on the browser market.
- posted by Dale Preston @ 8/16/2009 06:07:00 PM