Hi,
Thanks for the oportunity to let your team know of ideas for new features. I am a new user of VMC since I bought a new computer in December. I enjoy the product very much, it is a very good product - but not great. However, you guys have the ability to make it great with the ideas and suggestions by your users. So far I am using mainly the music and photo features and I have a wish list of items I hope you can incorporate.
1) The resolution of album art is way to low. On large screen tvs and monitors the low res album art looks tacky. Can you modify the product so users can you their own higher resolution album art?
2) When I run VMC on my computer you have linked the volume control in VMC to the Device in Windows Volume Mixer. You need to decouple this action so that when you change the volume in VMC it does not change the volume settings for all the other applications. For instance: I have my Windows Sounds set to about 33 - however when I lower the volume in VMC it also lowers the volume on all the applications not just the volume for VMC. It lowers the Windows Sounds to a point where you can no longer hear them and when you exit VMC the Device Volume remains what the last volume setting was in VMC.
3) When I was exploring the "Online Media" feature I was interested in adding some online radio stations via "Live365.com" - unfortunately no where does it say you have to pay for this service. It wouold be nice if you could indicate premium services that charge a subscription rate with a "$" symbol of by some other mechanism. I found a couple of internet radio plug-ins for VMC that allow users to listen to many of the same stations without charging a subscription fee. I did not realize there was a free 3 day listening period before you had to subscribe and pay a fee to continue to listen - so I added about 25 different stations. With that said, the issue that needs correction in the VMC program is that when I go to "Program Library Options" and then to "Edit Program Library" all of those stations appear in the list - there should be a way to delete them from the library. You can deselect them, but I want to remove them from the library as I will never use them.
4) On the same note, I would like the ability to hide/remove/delete some of the options in the "Online Media" feature that I won't use and don't want the kids trying to use.
5) With regard to Photos. I really like the "Play Slide Show" feature when you play music. It would be nice if you could turn off the "date" on the caption. I want to show the caption name but not the date, as many older photos do not have the exact date (or any date) taken. In fact when I do a slide show of our ancestors (pictures from the 1800s and early 1900s) it is funny to see dates in the current century. I know I can edit the dates, but that is to time consuming and fruitless when you don't know when the picture was taken in the first place.
6) There is a great feature in WMP11 that allows you to enter the lyrics for songs and then to sync the lyrics to the music. When you play the music in WMP11 the lyrics appear on the screen. Can you add this feature to VMC, it would be great to have the lyrics on the TV on my home theater system.
7) This is a minor bug. When I am using WMP11 and I open "Monitor Folders" there is a "C:\Users\Public\Recorded TV\" folder. I do not have a TV tuner yet and so I remove this folder. When I start VMC it adds this folder back to WMP11. I have deleted the samples in this folder but that did not keep it from being readded to the monitor list. Can you disable this folder in VMC until I add a TV tuner?
Thats about it for now, I am sure there will be more suggestions on other parts when I start using them.
Tom