Another reason to not go to WinXP - MP3

[NicColt]

Microsoft will do everything in order to control the medium. XP, Windows Media Player 8, Creative Audigy, there's a definite strategy going on here but I won't take any part in it.

Link to Inquirer

When XP is released, users will have a choice between WMA and MP3 but Microsoft is bringing top quality to its own format while offering inferior quality on the MP3 format.

 

[juiio]

MS already removed MP3 encoding from XP. Just continue to use whatever encoder and decoder you use now. Non-issue.

 

[NicColt]

This is not about the encoder, XP will deliberately play MP3's at an inferior quality.

 

[juiio]

Which is why I said "use whatever encoder AND DECODER you use now".

 

[HansXP]

That's a bunch of BS. XP plays MP3s just fine, and who cares if WMP can't encode MP3s very well? It couldn't encode them at ALL in earlier versions.

 

[DeeK]

We've been through this before. Most people don't use WMP to play MP3s. Any attempt by Microsoft to screw with third-party MP3 players will only piss people off and give the government more fuel for the antitrust case. So it isn't going to happen. If they make WMP's own decoder crippled, then people are going to just download something like Winamp instead of going through the trouble of converting all their stuff to WMA.

 

[azollman]

Just get the patch for WMP8... It restores original codecs and fixes the quality issues...