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blgentry:
--- Quote from: Vocalpoint on January 08, 2020, 01:26:14 pm ---Like Michael123 above - as scary as it sounds - I can feel a day is coming where I will no longer have the desire or time or need to maintain/manage a physical collection and will no doubt let JRiver go.
[...]
Not sure where MC is going to fit into those plans if all it wants to do is cater to an ever dwindling "audiophile" minority who steadfastly fills some odd need to "maintain" a physical library. (How 90's in retrospect :)
As one of this minority - I am certainly not ready to throw in the towel just yet. Like Mike123 - I like JRiver. I still love the sound and I still love the ability to "manage" my music and movies.
--- End quote ---
In reading your posts over the years, I thought you were kind of the classic MC user: A collector and "media librarian". There's a HUGE difference between the average media consumer (nearly everyone who owns a TV or radio or speaker) and a collector/librarian. Collectors care about quality. They care about curation. They care about provenance. Or to spell it out a bit more: People like me (and presumably you VP) want high quality recordings, sometimes very specific versions of a recording. We want to know exactly what that version is, and we want to be able to find it in our collection and play it any time.
MC really isn't for your average streamer. Or even an advanced streamer, since MC doesn't really "plug in" to the streaming world very much.
MC's core is about curation, cataloging, and the highest quality playback. This is almost the opposite of streaming services. Particularly when it comes to music. Quality is right out the door with streaming. With video quality tends to be much better, but the sound quality (of videos) isn't anywhere close to what you get from BluRay rips.
MC will probably continue to be used by people like us for a long time. I stream LOTs of video now. But I also maintain my own music collection (curated and cataloged). ...and my own video collection of the highest quality rips I can get, which are mostly from BluRay. Unfortunately, I don't currently use MC to play video as the cost of entry is way too high (for the HTPC which is required). But I still use MC to catalog and organize my video collection, and it is quite useful for that.
If these philosophical thoughts on MC and the state of entertainment in the world are not welcome in this thread, please say so and I will stop my pontificating.
Brian
JimH:
--- Quote from: blgentry on January 08, 2020, 04:50:01 pm ---If these philosophical thoughts on MC and the state of entertainment in the world are not welcome in this thread, please say so and I will stop my pontificating.
--- End quote ---
Don't stop. We appreciate your pontious thoughts!
eddyshere:
I'm just coming back to HTPC. Did it for over 20 years now and JRiver has been in my HTPC's since ages.
I was briefly away from JRiver until full bluray menu support came finally up.
Several above mentioned threads are kind of sad but also I have to say they are a fact. I have close to 300 music concerts I care to watch all over again in best quality be it video and audio. And many other movies, animations, documentaries etc...
I still have my beloved Oppo 205 which can read iso from network but(!) i also have an Apple TV and a zidoo player some smart TV's, ipads AND a wife and a son which have drifted to netflix spotify and roon/tidal long time ago.
Quintessence of this all is that my collection is now watched or listened to only by me.
I guess that the mentioned "loneliness" which caracterizes entertainement consumption in "mediocre" quality becomes a reality ... the irony is that we are actually condemned to exactly the same behaviour as we all hold on to our collections and quality requirements because WE are pleased by it. A said - in my household - nobody really cares anymore about my "home collection" as most is found in streaming format.
For me it's still worth it as i also enjoy building and fiddling around the hardware in my HTPC but I see a shift in paradigm and even though I resent it ... it's a reality
Vocalpoint:
--- Quote from: blgentry on January 08, 2020, 04:50:01 pm --- In reading your posts over the years, I thought you were kind of the classic MC user: A collector and "media librarian". There's a HUGE difference between the average media consumer (nearly everyone who owns a TV or radio or speaker) and a collector/librarian. Collectors care about quality. They care about curation. They care about provenance. Or to spell it out a bit more: People like me (and presumably you VP) want high quality recordings, sometimes very specific versions of a recording. We want to know exactly what that version is, and we want to be able to find it in our collection and play it any time.
--- End quote ---
Brian
You are bang on. I am the curator and collector and purveyor of quality. I have a very large collection of music and movies and love being the "librarian". But I do have to admit - as much as that is a passion - it's also a sad position when as eddysphere said "It is only ever listened to or watched by me". There is little joy in all this minutia if no one else is really interested.
I think back to the days when all I had was my little green plastic milk case with 38 albums in it. I think I got more pleasure out of those 38 records at the time because they were just there to be listened to. There was no need to ponder endless choices or no need to curate. No need to track down a better mastering - just pick a record out of the box and rock on. I think I yearn for the simplicity of those times and I think my wife and son are doing it right. Fire up the Roku - pick something and enjoy it. No wondering about it.
Not really sure why I am having a "what's it all about moment" - maybe its the start of a new year etc etc. But this concept of endless maintenance, curation and tracking specific recordings etc is oddly beginning to wear thin on me - just a little. Whereas listening to my wife and son go on about this TV series they found on Crave or a playlist on Spotify - it seems that they are get exactly what they are supposed to get out of their entertainment - watch a 58 minute episode of that or listen to 33 minutes of some playlist and then they move onto something else - free of having to curate anything. Free from technical issues and upgrades and antivirus exclusions - while I sit and edit metadata and hunt for album art and build out this giant physical collection that no one really cares about?
I am not ready to give up on the collection just yet - but I am wondering (now and then) if I really like this librarian gig?
VP
timwtheov:
@Vocalpoint.
Yes, to all of it. I still tag every day partly because I like it, but man: all the time I've used doing so is staggering to contemplate. I got so fed up with my classical music collection recently that I deleted many, many terabytes of, ahem, downloaded albums accumulated over the years. Once I did, I felt great and actually started listening to the music again, not just futzing with it in MC. Of course, I immediately started collecting and now am back to tagging a lot, but at least now I've only accumulated the merest fraction of what I had.
On the other hand, stuff disappears from streaming services without warning. I remember adding a bunch of Karel Ancerl (great 50s-60s Czech conductor) albums to a few Spotify playlists a couple of years ago, but they were gone from the service within about 2 months. That's what I find irritating about streaming: you never know when stuff is going to come or go. Mainstream services like Netflix also increasingly get rid of non-company-produced content. I just listened to a Film Comment podcast the other day where the conversation veered into this territory, about how the original promise of streaming (everything available all the time) has really been largely abandoned by the large companies like Netflix, Amazon, et al. There are some alternatives if your taste is less mainstream, like The Criterion Channel or Mubi or Kanopy, or more classical music-friendly streaming services like Qobuz, but the cost adds up when you're also subscribing to HBO and Prime and Netflix and YouTubeTV, and of course everything isn't always available even there (Mubi and Criterion continually rotate content) like it is on your external hard drive, e.g., I might not want to watch those Rivette movies in January when they're available, but in July when they're not: I want 'em.
I've considered just going to Roon for music, since I'd have to tag very little at all, and JRiver for video; but I like having everything in one place, plus all the JRiver features.
Anyway, my two cents.
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