Are computers too automated?

dave1701

dave1701

New Member
I started playing music off of windows media player to day only to discover that the album cover for a song(and there are a few others), You're Beautiful by James Blunt, has magically changed. Now for the album cover is a picture of a cheeseburger. No kidding. Windows media changed my album art for my song, and threw away the original, correct one.

Know I know that there is a setting for this, but stick with me.



Now that the album art is now a cheeseburger, I hit "find album info" thinking that windows media player was out of it's drunken state. It restores the album cover to it's original, but then changes the info to some song that is is not. Some song called "busted". Has nothing to do with the song I have.

At this point I am thoroughly annoyed with windows media player 12; it decided that my song is a busted cheeseburger, and I thought I liked WM12. I manually entered the album info and art in, but still, it's very annoying.

Conclusion of rant:

Doesn't it seem like computers and OS'es are getting more and more automated. It seems like Microsoft has traded control for user "friendly-ness". When a program crashes it says that it "stopped working". I have little evidence to back this up, but doesn't kind of feel like computers, too are being affected by the over trend in america of dependancy. People rely on other people to fix thing for them, or just buy something new.


Sorry about this rant, it's wasting your time, in fact you probably shouldn't read it.
 
Last edited:
dave1701 said:
playing music off of windows media player
*snip*
Click to expand...

Well there is your problem.

Jokes aside, I wouldn't say computers are too automated. We still control their on/off state, when they play said music, what programs run, etc. They certainly have become less tech friendly (more user friendly being the inverse) but that's where the market is.
 
To listen? Pandora.
To organize? MediaMonkey.
To put on my Zune? Zune Software.
Ipod? Itunes.

:)
 
I'll have to try media monkey. I have a zune too. I kinda with there was a way to get it to come up just as a mass storage device, like sanza devices do. Pandora annoys me, I still enjoy terrestrial radio.
 
Last edited:
dave1701 said:
I'll have to try media monkey. I have a zune too. I kinda with there was a way to get it to come up just as a mass storage device, like sanza devices do. Pandora annoys me, I still enjoy terrestrial radio.
Click to expand...

I've found the zune organization software does a pretty fantastic job with all of my music, you don't like it? I also use it as my main music player when not on pandora.
 
I use a carefully installed winamp. It's core program is great, it's many add-ons are not. Luckily you can configure exactly what you want installed with it through custom setup.
 
Last edited:
automation is a great thing, a really great thing. The problem with automation is developers assume what users want and automate it, but also provide APIs for scripting languages and such. However, 99% of users are not programmers so they won't be writing their own tools for automation.

Really, the problem is not automation but rather lack of options in customizing your automation with out having to write your own code to customize it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top