First off, great job in getting this out there. It looks to have quite a bit of potential and hopefully it will help build the Media Center base.
I have been using some type of subscription service since Rhapsody first came out. Since then I have used Yahoo, Napster, and a couple others that I cannot even remember the name of. As subscription services they have all seemed very similar to me. As music managers they have all left a lot to be desired. Due to this limitation I have used them simply as a way to discover new music, while using MC (since version 9) to manage/listen to my music. I have always wanted one piece of software that could handle all aspects of how I discover/manage/listen to music so I am pretty excited about the potential of PerformerMC.
That being said, the two things I am hoping for in PerformerMC are an easy way to discover/access new music and the ability to integrate it with my current MC setup. It would be unrealistic to expect the first release of PerformerMC to meet all of my (possibly unrealistic) expectations, but I was pleasantly surprised with how much it could do right out of the box.
Some pros:
• Search is very fast compared to other services, and more inclusive as well.
• Having audio/video/image capability was a nice surprise.
• Being able to restore my current MC13 library was also a nice surprise.
• Interface seems intuitive, though probably because I have been using MC for so long.
Some cons:
• Some of the skins are not as clean as the regular MC skins. For example, several of them have playing display in the top left corner but appear to be missing the cover art…or something, because there is a lot of empty space.
• It would be nice to be able to use the regular MC skins, though I realize that the layouts are different…but it would be nice to have the stock skins (noire, aruba, etc.) ported over.
• Discovering new music is not as straightforward as it is with Yahoo and Rhapsody. I will create a separate post for this.
All in all I think that the first release is a good start and shows a great deal of potential….though it may be awhile before it is ready to replace my current MC setup.
Dan
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Topic: First Impressions (Read 1757 times)