WMP11 BETA & Urge did what I spent 2 weeks trying to get Yahoo to do.  They actually synchronized subscription content to my Philips HDD6330/17.  And Yahoo had it's own rich client, complete with fancy support for synching with Apple's IPod.

 

Right now I'm just sitting here grinning...Yahoo was a horrible experience, and I fully expected this little experiment to fail.  But you know what?  Urge didn't even require that I enter all my billing information to get the "free" "trial" period.  Double plus bonus points to Viacom for CLUEFULNESS and producing a product that ACTUAL WORKS.

 

WMP11 Beta on XP seems to be working better for me than it does on Vista.  Interestingly enough, the Vista builds I've got right now have a newer version: 11.0.5381 vs. 11.0.5358.  I have to agree with Paul Thurrott that it actually looks better on XP than on Vista.  The glass effects aren't bad... it's just that the solid black works better.  And solid black is MUCH better than the battleship grey that replaces all the glass when running in Aero Basic like my TC4200 has to.  Type ahead search is cool...background file add to library is cool (nice riff on Media Center there)...album cover art for browsing in library is cool (again, nice riff on MCE).  Sync'ing in general has a better experience than WMP10.  Although I was distracted by all the new UI elements and things, so I missed the "Start Sync" button for a while and almost got frustrated (hint: draw a π/2 line, like in a Functional Iteration root find, then reflect over that from where the "Start Sync" button was in WMP10, and you'll see the new button).  Almost, but not quite.  Seeing the new Device libary view made up for it.

 

Hehe...I'm just happy everything is working correctly right now.  Need to look at how Urge handles my many computer's scenario, but if everything works out and the service works as well in a week or so as it does now, Urge definitely has my $150 yearly subscription fee.