Its not actually available yet, but it will be on Wednesday morning… Windows Media Player 11 is about to hit the net (link live on May 17th) in a new wave of Microsoft releases, and after some serious ass-whipping of late by iTunes, Microsoft now says “No More”. (via)

With all the comings and goings of various media players – iTunes, WinAMP, Sonique etc. I’ve always returned to Windows Media Player. Does exactly what I want to do, play music, no real frills required (though there’s a huge store of plugins for it), hooks up to various streams for me and its simple to use. Now its about to get an upgrade.

MP11 itself will “act as a repository for all your music, video, and images”, something which iTunes isn’t capable of doing at the moment. The interface seems to be one of the biggest overhauls, with the chance to navigate your entire music collection by artwork with improved artwork functionality over past versions of MP. Syncing with portable players (of which I don’t use the Apple variety) has also improved so thats something to look forward to I guess!

Anyway, the above link goes live on Wednesday morning or you can get an indepth review here from ABC. If you can’t wait, there’s already torrents floating around of the preview-beta release. You’ve got to pass the Geniune test mind you…