As per JimH recommendation, I am starting this thread just to let those of us Media Center users that mainly use it for MUSIC to post our opinions as to how successfully Media Center handles our needs for a music tool.
The scope ot this thread is to determine whether MC is good enough that you now use it routinely and don't need to use another tool for a specific purpose. If not, why?
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I came to MediaJukebox looking mainly for a flexible database music management tool. I was at that time (last October 2002) a MusicMatch user and that product had to me two downsides:
- Inability to perform as a database product for searching, sorting and managing my music collection the way I wanted to.
- Inability to manage large collections fluently. My collection was at that time of circa 20.000 tracks and still had some 1000+ CDs to rip. Some other apps that I previously tested gave up at collections of circa 10.000 tracks and MusicMatch was showing some sort of fatigue at that point.
I installed Media Jukebox 8 in late October and soon realize that it could be what I was looking for. Not only the database management tools were impressive... also the sound quality was better. I discovered the smartlists and other features that made my musical experience more rewarding.
Also, this forum and the way that J River was giving shape to Media Center 9 while in beta, by listening to the users comments and suggestions, was a factor that made me decide to start using "non-tag" database fields such as Album Artist, which added a bunch of possibilities to how I handle my database (thanks CMagic for your suggestions at that point
). I had been very reluctant to use non-tag fields before, since I had a very bad experience with RealJukebox some years ago realizing that all my database work on that software was lost when moving to a different one. I start using these "database-only" fields with Media Jukebox since I assumed that I could stick to this software for my music needs.
I upgraded to MC9 just last Monday when it was final release. My library is now of some 35.000 tracks, those 1000 CDs are still waiting to be ripped, and I do not see any sign of fatigue in MC
I'm certain that J River will continue to enhance the software with new features in the months to come and if it only does it the way I've seen doing it with MC9 during these months, the result will be as impressive as it is now.
Having said all that, I have to tell you that there is a feature in MusicMatch that I'm still using and it's the only reason that I have not uninstalled that software. This feature is MusicMatch Super-Tagging and, as once Zevele said, it's something that makes MM worth the price I paid for the license.
Since Media Center studio tagging has much more features than MM, I hope that in a very near future MC will have something similar to "SuperTagging" that will allow me to uninstall MM and make MC the only software I would need to handle all my music needs.
Thank you.