Ok, while I realize this forum will be a bit biased in favor of MC, I find that forum users in general are pretty straight-forward about this stuff. So I need your help.
I have a music only HTPC in my living room, currently running Windows MCE 2005. It does get a little use for photos and home videos, but 95%+ of the use is as our home music player. The computer is hooked up to a Yamaha receiver via optical out and I just use an LCD monitor and mouse (no TV).
I have been fairly happy with this solution, but I do have some issues that perhaps MC can help me solve. First is performance. Now that I have 500+ albums loaded, MCE is fairly slow. The box is only a 1.8GHz CPU and 512MB RAM, but still...no TV, just music! MCE has a reputation for being slow with music when you get large collections. Will MC11 or 12 speed things up?
Playlist management inside of MCE sucks. I have to drop out to Windows Media Player to create and manage playlists. I would prefer to do it in a single interface. Same with device management. I have a Rio Carbon that I sync, but also have to drop out of MCE to manage it with WMP. I like WMP's ability to down-convert the files to a lower bitrate to save space, since I rip everything into MCE as WMA loseless. It looks like MC12 has the ability to downconvert, which looks promising.
If moving away from WMA loseless is my best solution with MC, what should i convert to? FLAC? I want to stay loseless on the HTPC and only go for lower bitrates on my portable devices.
Also, I am thinking about an iPod. I don't mind the Rio, but want something with more space. I have previously stayed away from an iPod because I hate iTunes. MC looks like it can handle a iPod pretty well, so this becomes a very interesting solution. I buy CDs, so using iTMS is a non-issue for me. Zune had promise, but it locks you into their music software too, so that makes it un-interesting to me.
Taking a look at the screenshots, I am wondering how spouse friendly MC is. Windows MCE is nice because the interface is pretty basic and straight forward. I think my wife can live with a little move complexity for a few more features (like playlist management), but things can't get too complicated.
Further down the line, I am interested in creating a DVD server and rip most of our DVDs so that they can be easily managed. How well does MC do that?
So I guess I just need help understanding if MC is going to be enough of a better experience to merit messing with a fairly large collection of music. I hesitate to just install the demo before having more questions answered, because I don't want to mess with my current setup too much until I know I am going to dive into MC.
Thanks all,
Bryan