Windows Media Player performance

Thomas Hawk has a great Christmas wish list, with a lot of overlap to the things I’d like to see (I don’t need a Pogo stick with training wheels, though).

But in this post, once again, Thomas takes a shot at what he considers the miserable performance of Windows Media Player. I first read this complaint in a post by Thomas from last September, when he wrote an otherwise glowing review of Windows Media Player 10:

The single largest problem with Microsoft Media Player 10 remains the poor performance you have with large digital libraries. If you have 5,000 mp3s or less, this is not an issue. On the other hand if you are a hardcore, diehard, digital music enthusiast like I am then this simply will not cut it. I did notice a speed improvement between the WMP 9, WMP 10 Technical Beta and the final release of WMP 10 but it still can take about 1 minute and 30 seconds to move between playlists, libraries, etc. for my collection. Microsoft needs to continue to work on indexing and possibly allowing users to run the application in RAM to improve performance.

My digital music collection currently consists of 1,280 files in MP3 format and 10,488 files in WMA format, for a total of 11,768 tunes, which is well over the 5000-song limit where Thomas says he sees performance problems. In Windows Media Library and in Windows Media Center Edition, performance is essentially instantaneous for everything. When I click an album, a playlist, or an artist in the Media Player tree list, its contents appear without any hesitation. In Windows Media Center Edition, I notice a delay of approximately five seconds when I first view the list of albums, but after that, performance is lightning-fast.

The biggest difference between Thomas’s setup and mine is one he calls out explicitly: He’s a diehard supporter of the MP3 format, whereas nearly 90% of my collection is in WMA format. Every device I use supports WMA format (no iPod here), so this is simply not an issue for me. Anyone else see this issue?