I've been playing around with the newly redesigned Allmusic.com for about a week now (if you were signed up for their newsletter you got a sneak peek), and I wanted to put out my thoughts on it, and ask a question as well.

First, I think they did a fine job in the design of the site. It seems a little slow in loading and searches, but that may just be me. The one layout change that I have a problem with is the need to click on so many things to get more information. What used to be on one page when you were looking at an album is now on three or four, though I like the other pages they've added, like top Billboard chart positions and Grammy awards.

I also love the one thing I've been waiting for for a couple years now, and that's the audio clips. I've been in several music stores that have listening stations that use AMG, and I always wished they could put their music clips on their main website as well. Well, now they have, and that's where I need help.

What application is supposed to be able to play these clips? I have a whole lot of codecs installed, yet WMP cannot play them. What's even more frustrating is that I set Firefox up to only use mplayer for media files, but I can't get it to stop using WMP. Of course, I'm still not certain how to use mplayer for streaming content. So, anyone know how it works?

So, after using Allmusic for nearly 8 years now, it's nice to see them trying to change things around and add to their site, and I think the effort produced both good and bad changes. At least the public release of the site didn't have the problems the sneak peek had. every single link on the site was not useable in Firefox or any browser other than IE. Good thing they changed that