I’ve been asked a few times if installing the WMP 11 Beta will improve the performance of the music library in Media Center Edition 2005. Unfortunately the answer is no. However, if you install the Windows Vista Beta 2 you can see the improvements. I’d also love to hear from anyone who has compared the music library performance between MCE 2005 and Windows Vista. Did it improve? Did it improve enough?
In this past weekend’s NY Times Men’s Fashion Spring 2006 Magazine Alice Rawsthorn penned, Record Losses and article about the changing nature of album cover art:
Those same nostalgics are even angrier about digital downloading, claiming that it has destroyed the visual side of music. And while it’s true that an album cover will never mean as much to the generation of kids for whom buying music is just a virtual trip to iTunes, luckily for them, the visual aspect of music is about to be reinvented.
In Media Center we place a lot of emphasis on album cover art. For instance the default view for my music is (Dec CTP screenshot):
Are we correct to put so much emphasis on cover art? Can users really identify an album solely based on it’s cover? I know for me that album covers have lost a lot of meaning in recent years as I listen to music solely through my Media Center or my iPod. Sure the album art comes up while the song is playing on either device, but there is no longer an emotional connection to it.
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