Windows Media Player 10 drives me nuts. So I’ve uninstalled it and rolled back to Windows Media Player 9.
I don’t have anything against MP 10 per se. Indeed, when it came out I wrote a positive post about it. It’s a good evolution of the player with lots of additional and improved functionality to let you do all sorts of things to build your media library. There’s a good review of MP 10 on Paul Thurrott’s Windows Super Site.
No, what I don’t like about it is that it’s a navigation nightmare finding the radio tuner. I use the media player primarily for listening to internet radio. So for me, all the bells and whistles aren’t what I want. What I do want is a very easy way to find my radio stations for the times when I’m sitting here pounding the keyboard. MP 9 lets me do precisely that. Right now, I have Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra quietly playing in the background, on a 100K high bandwidth stream from the excellent Choice Radio.com Classical. Nice and relaxing and an aid to concentration.
With MP 10, I could never remember how to get to the radio stations selection list – it really isn’t easy. Even when I finally wrote down some quick notes to remind me, it was still a total pain. With MP 9, all you do is fire it up, wait a bit for the ‘Loading…’ to finish (it does take a while: MP 10 starts up much quicker) and then just click on Radio Tuner in the left-hand menu bar.
Relaxing is as simple as that.