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Author Topic: I'd support a kickstarter campaign to write a book or manual  (Read 1798 times)

Sapagrino

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I'd support a kickstarter campaign to write a book or manual
« on: September 25, 2016, 08:55:05 am »

I understand the development approach and philosophy make this unlikely, but even if a book/manual was issued only every 3-5 years (or even once), it would provide at least one "linear" approach on how to scale much of MC's learning curve.  A linear approach to learning MC would be somewhat limiting, but would serve as a great point of departure for then browsing the forum and wiki.

Thinking on the formal book approach, beyond the primary text (say, describing how to generally use smart playlists) I imagine there could be various "try this" call-outs focused on "I never thought of even trying that" and it could be fairly independent of release version.  One of my favorite smart list strategies to share with friends: Create a smart playlist that contains one song from every album (or artist, etc) by use of the "avoid duplicates" modification.

I think I'd pay $50-$100 to support a kickstarter for such a written or e-book if written by one or more of the highly respected forum members.

I know, I'm dreaming...
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blgentry

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Re: I'd support a kickstarter campaign to write a book or manual
« Reply #1 on: September 25, 2016, 09:13:18 am »

That's an interesting idea and quite the coincidence.  Literally about 24 hours ago I was thinking about this same thing.  Specifically, I was considering what it would take for me to write "JRiver Media Center, The Missing Manual".

Even borrowing lots of material from the Wiki it would be quite a lot of effort.  It's probably even more than my mental estimates.

Honestly, one of the big motivating factors here is monetary.  I would be much more inclined towards doing this project if there was sufficient compensation involved.  In other words, being paid for my efforts.

I'm just not sure how many people would be willing to pay, even a small amount, for something like this.  If enough people were interested and truly willing to pay a small amount of money, then it would be worth doing.

I'm not sure of the interest level.  It might be higher than I think.  Or it might be very, very small.  It's hard to estimate this kind of thing.

The scope of writing a JRiver MC "book" would also be a consideration.  I would necessarily want to omit certain features that are either extremely complex, or that I have no experience with, or both.  The biggest one of these would be the TV feature.  It's very complex, changing very rapidly, *and* I have no experience with it.

Anyway, interesting that we were both thinking of this at almost the exact same time.

Brian.
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Sapagrino

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Re: I'd support a kickstarter campaign to write a book or manual
« Reply #2 on: September 25, 2016, 09:31:26 am »

Thanks, Brian.  I like the title, and agree with the need to exclude certain things.  If written by someone from the community like yourself, it could probably take a bit of an unconventional approach and provide links to the wiki/forum when alluding to something out of scope.  You could probably track clicks on the links to know what folks might be interested in seeing an addendum for.  Even providing annotations for the various links would be great:  I recall researching "All Media views" leveraging a member's posts (AlexB).  He kindly would make posts with a dozen or so links to his other helpful posts.  I was in deep, so I copied the list of links and added brief descriptions about what deep dive I'd find there (e.g., "These posts discuss this thing about Cover Art I'm skipping: 1. [link] - when might want to use png vs jpg; 2. [link] - various cover art providers and their benefits; ...).



Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
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JimH

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Re: I'd support a kickstarter campaign to write a book or manual
« Reply #3 on: September 25, 2016, 12:30:44 pm »

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Could you turn this off please?

Many of the things that people want help with would be difficult to document.  DAC's, and video problems, for example.

A manual and the pros and cons have been discussed in the past.  Anyone is free to write a book but be prepared to update it several times a year.
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