Okay, so I've been using WMP11 Beta/Urge for about 24 hours now. And I've noticed a few things that damper my enthusiasm of yesterday a bit. On the whole though, I still really like WMP11 and Urge.
Performance is also somewhat of a problem. When doing some things in the UI, like selecting "Open File Location", it takes much longer than I'd expect. In some cases, nothing happens. There really isn't any consistency to this, other than its worse shortly after WMP is started. Probably just perf tuning that'll happen by the RTM build.
Then we get to the device issues I've had...oh boy are there a bunch of them!
For some reason, sync'ing just one copy protected file at a time works. If you try to do more than one, just the first works. If, after sync'ing that one file, an attempt to sync another file is made while in the Sync view (i.e., if you told it to sync multiple items in one batch, or told it to sync one item, then tried to sync another) all subsequent sync attempts fail until WMP is exited and restarted. This is EXTREMELY ANNOYING. I have found a workaround though: if I sync ONE file, then exit the Sync view by openning the Library tab, then browse through the library to find the next song to sync, and THEN open Sync view back up and tell it to sync just ONE file, it works without having to restart WMP every time. The worst part is that you can download whole albums with Urge...and then spend the next 15 minutes having to individually sync every single song.
Oh, and once songs are sync'd to my Philips HDD6330/17 and I unplug it and go to listen to all that music I just transferred, it's discovered that Picture support doesn't work. So I don't have any album art on my device. It's a little thing, but you get used to having it there. Just makes the whole experience more colorful...and better.
For some songs, it turned out not having the associated album art was the least of the problems. I rip CD's using WMA Lossless. So every one of those CD's that I decide to transfer to my HDD6330 has to be transcoded down to a 320Kbps standard WMA file. Some of those transcodes seem to have gotten screwed up. I don't know if it picked the wrong frequency, or the timing of things is just off, but a few of the songs that I transferred sound ATROCIOUS.
At least those bad files attempted to play. Songs that I had downloaded from Urge and then transferred to my HDD6330 last night, but that I didn't try and listen to until this afternoon, didn't play at all. My poor HDD6330 just sits there like it's going to play them, but locks up for 10s or so before giving up and booting you back to the Music menu.
Ah the fun of Beta Software!