So yesterday in a magazine I saw some screenshots of WMP 11 Beta. It looked pretty sweet, so I downloaded it. Here is comes ladies and gentlemen… *drum roll* …. Microsoft did a kick ass job on this one. Starting with the player itself it is very intuitive and the default skin looks beautiful with the black glass effect. THEN I found out that with the Beta you get a 14 days test trial of MTV’s Urge music service. The 14 day trial is available without any credit card information or whatever so if you don’t like it, just forget about it and it goes away. >>I<< however will be paying the 99 bucks a year for the all you can eat music package (149 if you want portable device support). That is basically 33 cents a day and I can listen to whatever songs I want on my computer, which is where I am most of the time.

SO, why the big deal? Between iTunes and services like Napster, Real and Yahoo doing this before you would think I would find this old hat. To me it is a combo issue. I used to like the iTunes player, it was nice and intuitive, but that shit crashed on me all the time and ate like all the resources on my machine. (So far WMP 11 is using about 4% of my laptop) Services like Napster, Real and Yahoo had decent offering but the method to play them wasn’t very friendly and their players were awkward. If you used iTunes, this player has a very similar feel to it… what I think are almost all the same features… Podcasts, videos, etc. My hat off to Microsoft…. if I wore a hat that is.
Oh yeah and my Hats off to Audioscrobbler/Last FM for making my playlist linkable to clips… now you can check out SOME of the music I am listening to.