In case you're blind and didn't know I was beta testing Windows 7, then get out from under your rock. Well, while my full review is still a ways in the future, I figured I'd mention one part of W7 that hasn't managed to even remotely impress me, like all of its previous versions: Windows Media Player.
Now, it's not because I hate the WMP12 UI, or because I have some stupid grudge against WMA/WMV (even though I do, that's not why I hate WMP) or because I fault it for WMDRM. My issue with it has always been its performance and general slugishness, and it's only gotten worse since v11. Although, after having been on linux and avoiding WMP like the plauge since v10 anyways, I've reripped most of my music with LAME's -V0 encoding, and purchased new music online with Amazon MP3.
However, WMP doesn't seem to like my LAME -V0 music, since it locks the player up (even when just viewing the library) and causes excessive CPU usage (>50% on my 2GhZ P4) to play them. Quod Libet will sit and use about 3% of my CPU to play the same files under Ubuntu, so obviously microsoft's latest MP3 codec is not up to snuff. To top it off, however, Windows Media Center suffers (an application I absolutely love) suffers from this because it uses Windows Media Player to decode and playback media.
I've sent this issue to microsoft using the "Send Feedback" application included with the beta, and hopefully they'll fix it before the release. But having such issues with music files is not going to win many audiophiles over, especially since it's as close to CD quality you can get with WMP/WMC without using Windows Media Lossless codec and losing the ability to play the files on other platforms.
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