I readily admit that I am hard on computers, I really do break them on a regular basis while seeming to find the absolute limits of what they are capable of. So with more than a little trepidation I installed the Release Candidate build (7100) of Windows 7 and set it to work scanning my overly large and complicated media library.
As a primer, it should be noted that my music library alone is somewhere over 30,000 songs and many of them have horribly broken tags that I refuse to fix, left over from many, many sessions of ripping the original CDs over the years. Every version of Windows Media Player ever released has choked on them at some point. ITunes is beyond worthless, freezing and locking up during the scan process and never fully recovering. Winamp has long since bit the dust and even the mighty VLC goes down for the count when so many tracks are added to its “media library.” My hopes for WMP 12 doing any better were very low.
Imagine my surprise when, after mere hours, it responded by downloading album artwork and behaving very snappily when searching through the volumes of tunes I have given it. Better still, none of these tracks were located on the PC where Windows 7 resides: they were on a network attached storage device, the Netgear ReadyNAS. Searching for tracks: quick. Playing tracks: near instantaneous. Exploring the library in Media Center: darn right blissful. All this from a Microsoft product? Color me impressed. My next run at it will be to fire up another system and try streaming from one W7 system to another, both inside and outside the home network. The nets say it’s possible, but we shall see.
