Like many people, I had a problem with Windows Media Player taking too long to start playing music or videos. I would load a cd or a converted mp3 track, and WMP would take up to two minutes to start playing.
The software loaded with no problem, it just would not start playing straight away. I found this irritating, and looked everywhere for a solution. I tried many suggestions.
I removed my codecs pack, uninstalled VLC (to see if it was causing a problem - it wasn't), scanned the registry, and fixed some corrupt entries.
Nothing fixed the problem, so I trawled through all my downloaded media player files that I had collected over the years. In there, something called ffdshow caught my eye. I knew it to be a faithful addition to my software and for many years had done its job without a murmur. I realised that I had never bothered to update it, so I checked online to see what the latest version was.
To my surprise, my installed version dated back to 2004 and, even more surprising, this was still the latest version! I was about to give up, when I noticed that, although ffdshow updates had stopped, there was now a free spin-off version, called 'ffdshow tryouts'. It seemed like an odd name, but I thought I would give it a 'tryout' anyway. I downloaded it from http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/download.php and installed it straight away. It automatically uninstalled the previous version for me, so everything happened automatically.
The results were immediately noticeable. My Windows Media Player now loads songs immediately, and behaves exactly as it should!
If, like me, you are also having issues with WMP taking too long to load and play songs, try installing the latest version of 'ffdshow tryouts'. With any luck, you this will be the solution to your mp3 problems!
My system: Windows Vista with WMP 11
