"Hello, my name is Jeff and I have a problem."
I feel as though I need to utter that phrase since everyone tells me that is the first step in admitting you have a problem. I have been using Media Center for nearly 2 months now and in that time I have learned some very disturbing things about myself. When given a tool as powerful as Media Center, I will ignore all recommendations to "wade in" and see how the water is. Instead, I am more of a "don't look at the depth markers and dive head first yelling 'Cannonball!'" kind of guy. Within the first three or four days after installing the software, I had dredged through stereo cabinets, kids rooms, friends houses, cars, attics, and anywhere else I could think of to gather every CD I could find. Then, in the middle of the night with only the glow of the CD Burner power light I began ripping everything on the planet slowly making my way through a stack of CDs that resembled the Sears Tower in height and mass. This of course led to the purchase of a new hard drive "But honey, it IS a matter of life or death. We HAVE to have every song we ever heard at our finger tips." So after countless hours of doing the CD Shuffle, I finally have all my music in one place. I thought, "Well that wasn't so bad" but then as I went into Media Center and learned about tags, album art, analyzing music, lyrics I realized I had only touched the surface. I now find all of my waking hours consumed with finding out all details about each and every song. I am collecting album art like a crazed Andy Warhol fan, and find myself going nuts if I cannot find an accurate release date or a specific version of lyrics. Until I installed the Media Center software, I was a relatively normal guy who hung out at the ballpark watching baseball. Now when I go, I find myself jotting down lyrics or music that is played before a batter reaches the plate because I need to make sure and create a baseball smartlist of all music I have heard at the ball game in order [random] that will fit on a MP3 CD that I have not heard since last season. This is not good.
I have noticed one thing in Media Center and I am not sure whether it is my computer or if others are having the same problem. There are times when I am searching the Internet for song information when Media Center stops updating the "content window" (I have no idea whether that is an accurate term, I usually refer to it as the big center window but that probably isn't the technical term for it. I can traverse the tree of artist and album on the left side but the middle window that usually shows me the songs associated with that artist/album doesn't update. It is like it freezes or something. I have to quit Media Center and open the application again. It then works for a while. I haven't been able to figure out exactly what triggers this to stop but last night (well technically REALLY early this morning), I was going to rick.com to see what the top 40 was for this week to make sure I had a smartlist that contained all the songs, I found that when I looked at the page containing the top 40, Media Center would lose its way nearly every time. I typically will go to rick.com, look at the countdown, open a new browser window and go to Amazon.com to find what the name of the album is from the artist, then go to Media Center to look to see if I have that song or if I should add it to my list of singles to buy. Somewhere in that bouncing from browser to browser to media center is when the content window stops responding. Can anyone tell me if they have had a similar experience or if this is just another topic I should add to my weekly therapy sessions with my shrink?
Thanks for the help and sorry for the length of this post. Just some things I had to say. Thanks again for a great product; it has been fun as well as obsessive.
Jeff
Author
Topic: The road to recovery ... Help needed (Read 1222 times)