Yikes! this is getting really weird. Don't know why, but I got up this morning and decided that it was time to retreat to 9.0. Which I did.
Why? you may ask (or not). I'd just wrapped my head around the 9.0 changes, decided I liked the properties window the way it was in 9.0 and, powerful or not, Panes were a pain. 9.0.180 seems fairly stable on my system and I only have MJ/MC for music.
I really like:
1. Tagging in 9.0 (there may be more pwerful taggers but I can't imagine what they would do and don't care).
2. Burning audio/data. I sleep easy at night knowing that most of my music is now archived to Cd's labeled "Data CDnnn" and tagged accordingly. When my Music HD crashes (and it will crash) the rebuild will be relatively painless.
3. Finally figured out what I needed to do to browse by Artist/Album in thumnail mode (its a view under Media Library) and and double-click to play, its a treat. I like to see the cover art and so does my wife. In fact she really likes it because that's how she remembers music she likes, not artist and not artist, but the cover art.
4. If its Lame VBR encoder is shelling out to DOS I'm not aware of it all I know is that it is significanly faster than Lame 3.92.
5. Does 9.0 do everything I want it to do, the way I would like it to? No. But it does the above and imports new tracks and updates my library like a comet compared to many other players I've looked at.
So, good luck to all! I'll keep checking in and following new developments but I need a really compelling reason to move beyond 9.0.
Thanks
George