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[benn600]

I just found out about MC in July or so and I must say that I am so thankful.  I format our house computers every summer because I'm out of school and I spent hours looking for a media player.  Unfortunately, I didn't find one in time and I had to settle with the terrible iTunes.  It does not work well with the database being stored on a network so I have to move the My Music folder and trick it.  I just hate everything about it.

One day, I seem to recall that I might have found MC from the FLAC web site, so I tried it and could not stop being impressed more and more.  I immediately got rid of iTunes and began the switch to MC.  This also gave me the urge to rip all my music to FLAC and scan all the cover art in by hand to ensure high resolution/high quality/ exact images for all my CDs.  MC has allowed me to rediscover music.  Also, since I switched to FLAC, I threw out all the MP3's I had ripped from many (some scary) sources and I now have a complete library direct from CDs (many used) which I own.  About $1000 later, I have what I would describe as a perfect music library.  Before, I had a lot of missing information and album information was rarely correct--it usually just said Single.

Now to my real question.  I hear a lot about how people have been using MJ for a long time.  How old is JRiver?  Was there ever a MJ 1.0?  2.0?  They're almost to version 12!  How often do new versions come out on average?  Once a year?  More, less?  I think MC is addictive.  Once you've experienced the power features nicely configured in a beautiful program, you can't go back.  I know you can get all the functionality with various free programs, but MC does it all so carefully and neatly.

They also keep making the program better with user requests, which makes it even more outstanding!

[jgourd]

The earlist vseion I am aware of is 5. I don't think I have purchased the same program so many times during upgrades and been so happy to do it. I got my boss hooked on it this past week. He brought all his CDs down from the attic and is doing a massive rip while out sick.

I love the fact that someone wrote a Beyond Media plugin to MC11 so when I get out of BeyondTV, I can go straight to MC11.

[Matt]

Thanks for the kind words.

This summer is JRiver's 25th anniversary.

[marko]

no date...
but...

Media Jukebox v1.0.352:

[RobOK]

no date...
but...

Media Jukebox v1.0.352:

Awesome!!!

[KingSparta]

marko

got a copy of that?

[benn600]

Now that is absolutely crazy.  It looks like it's running on XP, too!  I cannot believe that, though.  We got our first real (usable) computer back in 1997 and I can't believe how much things have advanced.  I had no clue JRiver was that old, either!

[dcwebman]

This summer is JRiver's 25th anniversary.

That's excellent, but most likely JRiver wasn't always developing PC code since the IBM  PC was introduced in August 1981 (coincidentally 25 years ago), a year before I joined the IBM PC division and worked on PC software there. (Am I that old already???) Of course you could have been doing TRS 80, Apple II, or some other code.

It would be interesting to see a brief history of JRiver's product career.
Jeff

[KingSparta]

Keep in mind MC And MJ Is not the only products JRiver produces.

[Alex B]

This old MP3 decoder test at mp3-tech.org has a screenshot of Media Jukebox 5:

http://mp3decoders.mp3-tech.org/contents.html
http://mp3decoders.mp3-tech.org/decoders_mjb.html

MJ5 passed all tests and was found to be "Excellent".

[JimH]

That's excellent, but most likely JRiver wasn't always developing PC code since the IBM  PC was introduced in August 1981 (coincidentally 25 years ago), a year before I joined the IBM PC division and worked on PC software there. (Am I that old already???) Of course you could have been doing TRS 80, Apple II, or some other code.

It would be interesting to see a brief history of JRiver's product career.
Jeff

I should have bought an IBM PC when they first came out in 81 but I was too cheap (didn't have the money) so I bought an Osborne and began to learn to program.

In the next three years, we wrote and published Accounting for Micros, a set of accounting programs for $125 each.  General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payble, Inventory, and Payroll.  We offered these first for the Osborne, then for CP/M computers in general, then for DOS and finally Windows.  We started a port to SCO Xenix (a flavor of UNIX) but it didn't seem right.

In 1987, we switched to networking software, introducing first a small TSR program called Deja Vu.  It emulated a Wyse 60 terminal on a DOS PC to connect to UNIX computers.  We added file transfer and printing and called it ICE.TEN (serial connections).  We then added a TCP/IP stack for DOS (before Microsoft had one) and connected via Ethernet (when the cards cost $200).  This was ICE.TCP.

In 1998 we began work on the player which became first Media Jukebox and now Media Center.

Along the way, we wrote a very good DRM and e-commerce system called Music Exchange.  We never sold it though.

[dlone]

good grief - thats a long and windy road to now

[dcwebman]

I should have bought an IBM PC when they first came out in 81 but I was too cheap (didn't have the money) so I bought an Osborne and began to learn to program.

Very interesting history, thanks. Good thing you were cheap. I took advantage of the employee purchasing and still ended up paying over $4K for a dual floppy PC with expansion unit and a big 10MB hard drive, monochrome monitor, and dot matrix printer. Amazing what kind of computer that money could buy today!

[bturner45]

Very interesting history, thanks. Good thing you were cheap. I took advantage of the employee purchasing and still ended up paying over $4K for a dual floppy PC with expansion unit and a big 10MB hard drive, monochrome monitor, and dot matrix printer. Amazing what kind of computer that money could buy today!

laughing... this brings to mind my first computer.  A PC clone with dual floppy, printer, amber monitor and Hercules graphics card.  Quite nice at the time. It had a 'turbo' that let it run at the awesome speed of 10 MHz. $500.  Last summer I bought my new system with far more capability, and an 'all-in-one' printer for about $100 more than I paid for my first system.  I got my first system used.  I could have never afforded a new one, and a hard drive was simply way to expensive to even consider unless you were a good sized company.

Thanks for the short but interesting tour down memory lane.   A lot of us have come a long way over the past 25 years haven't we?  I also had an Osborne and used CP/M.   When I started college we were still using punched card readers and COBOL was all the rage.  The mainframe was in Mission Valley and had links to 8 campuses scattered hither and yon across the county. 

[Two Wire]

This has reminded me of my first computer which I built in in the 70's, complete with a cassette tape recorder for external storage. None of those high Faluent, high tech storage devices for me. Not even a keyboard. I used binary switches on the front panel to load programs.

[bturner45]

This has reminded me of my first computer which I built in in the 70's, complete with a cassette tape recorder for external storage. None of those high Faluent, high tech storage devices for me. Not even a keyboard. I used binary switches on the front panel to load programs.

I was still in the Navy at that point but I do remember those.  Started college at San Diego City College in the fall of 1980 and one of my professors for 'Intro to Computers' was a Mr. Hill.  He had white hair by that time.  He was one of the 'original geeks' I guess, along with folks like Grace Hopper, the lady that created COBOL.  One day we were talking about 'debugging' and he told us how that term came about.

'Back in the day' mainframes filled entire rooms.  They used vacumn tubes.  As you were talking about above you had to make a physical connection to set a binary switch for the programs.  One day a program that had been working fine just quit working.  So they opened it up and went poking around to find out why, thinking a tube might have burned out.  What they found was that a moth had somehow gotten into the case, gotten fried by one of the connections, and shorted it out.  They removed the moth and it started working again.

Hence the term 'debugging' was born. laughing... and folks say geeks have no sense of humor.

[glynor]

Here's a picture of that fateful moth.  However, according to wikipedia, the term "bug" has been used for quite some time to describe mechanical malfunctions.

For instance, Thomas Edison wrote the following words in a letter to an associate in 1878:

    It has been just so in all of my inventions. The first step is an intuition, and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise—this thing gives out and [it is] then that "Bugs"—as such little faults and difficulties are called—show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.[1]

Problems with radar electronics during World War II were referred to as bugs (or glitches), and there is additional evidence that the usage dates back much earlier.

The invention of the term is often erroneously attributed to Grace Hopper, who publicized the cause of a malfunction in an early electromechanical computer. A typical version of the story is given by this quote:

    In 1946, when Hopper was released from active duty, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark II and Mark III. Operators traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book September 9th 1945. Stemming from the first bug, today we call errors or glitch's [sic] in a program a bug. [2]

Hopper was not actually the one who found the insect, as she readily acknowledged. And the date was September 9 of 1947, not of 1945 [4] [5]. The operators who did find it were familiar with the engineering term and, amused, kept the insect with the notation "First actual case of bug being found." Hopper loved to recount the story. [6]

While it is certain that the Mark II operators did not coin the term "bug", it has been suggested that they did coin the related term, "debug".

[Two Wire]

Yes. That was the ENIAC computer built in 1946. Eighteen-thousand vacuum tubes and a box of light bulbs. All that for about 5000 operations/sec. Required about 150 kw of power  That glitch resulted, as you said, from a moth being caught in the jaws of a set of contacts from a relay.