Windows Media Player
 

Can Wine make Windows Media Player run in Linux? If it could, that would remove one impediment to my abandoning Windows--I don't like any of the music players I have seen in Linux (Kaffeine, Amarok and one other common app whose name I don't recall). One of them, either Kaffeine or Amarok, tends to crash most of the time for me anyway. I don't like the overall Windows operating system any more than anyone else, but Windows Media Player just works; it does everything I want.

Have you tried VLC (Video Lan Client)? Available here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ It's skinnable (i've no doubt there will be a winblow$ media player skin available for it) and, it does far more than WMP and, best of all...It just works! :)

Okay, I'll look at it. Thank you. Is it called Video Lan because it's designed with videos in mind?

I don't know, perhaps that's a question for the developers :scratch: :D

I've been using Amarok for over a year and I haven't had too many problems with it, as long as you use the XINE backend then it's fine, crashes less often than WMP did on my Windows box :-)

I have not run WINE for a long time, but when last I did it would play an old version of WMP but not the then-current version (release 8 IIRC).

As WINE becomes more and more complete in implementing the Windows API, you would certainly think it would play WMP. But I can't say for sure.

Try it and see, or visit winehq.com and see what they have to say about it.

edit: Actually, being curious, I did just that. According to this page, WMP 10 and 11 don't play though WMP 9 does play with some minor issues. I guess this isn't too surprising; WMP10 has a lot of that digital rights management junk in it and that (I think) would cause it to break in an environment where the real Windows kernel wasn't present.