I was asked today to provide a 250 word “expert opinion” for the Official Windows Vista magazine.

Typically a staff writer will create a feature article and then ask a relevant expert for an opinion, which is then added to the main article.

I was asked to provide an opinion on music in Windows Vista…

Here is the 250 word piece I submitted:

With every new edition of Windows we have been used to seeing improvements to the way we can enjoy our multimedia, however Windows Vista has some BIG changes when it comes to audio…

One of the major areas that caused stability problems in previous versions of Windows - was audio.

These stability problems were mainly caused by the audio “code” being part of the main Windows system code. In Windows Vista this code (called the Audio Stack) has been removed from the main Windows code (called the kernel) and this is proving to have many benefits!

In addition Microsoft has re-written much of the audio code to make your favourite music sound even better on a Windows Vista PC.

Add to that a new feature called “glitch resilience” that enables very high quality audio and video playback performance on Windows Vista PC and you can see why, as a digital media professional, I am so happy with Windows Vista.

Microsoft has also upgraded Windows Media Player to version 11 and it contains some much welcomed improvements and new features! Two of my favourite are the ability to display and search 1,000’s of music tracks much faster than before and “reverse synchronization” – any media present on a compatible portable device can now be replicated back onto the PC!

Quick Tip:

WMP11 automatically monitors your profiles’ Music & Video folders for any changes. If you select F3 then choose Advance Options, you can then add other local/network folders for WMP11 to automatically monitor and then show the changes in the player library.

Regards

Marc Liron
Microsoft MVP
www.marctalkstech.com

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The Windows Live Messenger team has announced today that Beta 2 of the new 8.5 version is available for downloading and testing.

This beta is available in 35 languages!

If you are a Windows XP user you will need to have Service Pack 2 installed.

While the look and feel is almost the same as Beta 1, they have listened to feedback and fixed many of the top issues reported by users of 8.5 beta 1.

You can grab your copy here:

http://get.live.com/betas/messenger_betas

Enjoy.

Regards

Marc Liron
Microsoft MVP
www.marcliron.com

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