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[johnkaess]

I hope this is taken the way i intend it. I'm hoping that the developers/programmers can make this the kind of experience it truly should be.

1. I made sure i had a backup of MC 23 then downloaded MC 24.0.25
2. Ran the dmg file - acted as a standard Mac installer should.
3. MC 24 began running and was preparing to scan my hard drives and find all the music and pictures and videos on my drives. I fortunately saw this disaster about to happen and was able to stop it before it proceeded.
4. There was no prompt asking me if this was an upgrade or a fresh install.
5. There was no prompt asking for the location of my library files.
6. There was no prompt offering me any kind of advice or process for how to proceed with an upgrade from a previous version.
7. I searched the forums and googled for advice on how to proceed. This should not have been necessary.
8. I used Library Tools to restore my backed up library and settings. This actually accomplished almost everything i was expecting from the upgrade process except for the part that i had to google and search to forums on how to do this.
9. MC24 and it's content and playlists and settings were now as i expected them to be.
10. I then checked the registration info in MC24 and it said that it was not registered. Now, i had already upgraded my license more than a month ago and installed the new license in MC23, however, despite what it said in my emails and on the forums, MC24 did not recognize that i had a valid registration in MC23 as it apparently should have, so i had to hunt down the email from JRiver from when i purchased the upgrade to get a current license file to install. (Good thing i always save that kind of stuff).
11. Finally, it seems that everything is the way it should have been in step #2 above. The rest should have been unnecessary.

My opinion is that when you spend $50 for a program and then another $18 to upgrade it, it should handle all this without the user having to hunt down a basic process for an upgrade. In addition, at the very least there should be a prominent post on the Mac forum under the current version explaining how to proceed with an upgrade if the programmers for some reason don't think they should make the program itself do these steps automatically.

[JimH]

A lot of the information you needed is available on the forum and it's linked from several pages you should have visited.  Here, for example, at the bottom:
https://www.jriver.com/purchase_24_mac_as_upgrade.html

I've just added a link to that page on the Mac board.

Thanks for the feedback.

[johnkaess]

The new post you made at the top of the forum does contain the information i needed (though it is at the very bottom and i did miss it since i'd already done the license upgrade a month or more ago).

However, imagine how helpful it would be if the information contained at the bottom of the post were to show up on the opening page when first running a newly installed version of Media Center. It would have saved me hours of time, and placing that information is a very helpful and user friendly way to head off the problems i experienced because i had already purchased the upgraded license but held off on installing the upgraded version of Media Center until it looked like things were running pretty smoothly.

BTW, it was the implementation of Radio Paradise which finally pushed me over the edge to sit down and perform the upgrade. Thanks for that great new feature!

[JimH]

... imagine how helpful it would be if the information contained at the bottom of the post were to show up on the opening page when first running a newly installed version of Media Center.

Your suggestions are useful, but it's not as clearcut as you might imagine.

For example, we don't track when you upgraded.  You might use MC23 for a while with an MC23 license, then purchase the upgrade, then actually install MC24 sometime later.  The precise timing can cause the instructions to change.

You could have been running any prior version of MC in a licensed or unlicensed state when you upgraded.  We don't have that information, but it might change what you need to do slightly.

In my opinion, the power of search (especially a Google search) can almost make structured information obsolete, or at least less important.