Windows Media Player (“WMP”) 11 has made the rounds on the tech sites. I’ve taken a look at it and it looks good. I’m a Mac user and Microsoft has dropped WMP support with WMP 9 (which is terrible compared to 10 and 11). After seeing WMP 11 with its slick interface and organization of all kinds of files. If you haven’t seen the screenshots, WMP organizes pictures, CDs (I’m not sure about video organization) into stacks. You’ve got slideshows, music and video playlist management in a free piece of software.

I really want WMP 11 on Mac OS X. Hopefully, Mac OS X 10.6 – Leopard will have virtualization built in so I can run a Windows program on my Mac. I just haven’t found a true replacement for WMP since switching to OS X. iTunes is great for music management – it’s crap for video (it handles like 2 file formats) and iPhoto is a separate application. I would rather there was an all-in-one app for the Mac.

Video Lan Client (“VLC”) can handle everything great on any OS. But there just isn’t true playlist management like WMP. One of these days, I’m going to have to quit my complaining that VLC is not WMP by taking the open source VLC and giving it the functionality I miss. In the alternative, any one else can take my idea and feel free to implement full playlist management (maybe even smart playlist management like iTunes too while we’re at it).