Some thoughts of a non-pro, but strategic thinking music lover....
These days I had some time to sit back and ask myself: is MC still the right product for me?
- Apple with its itunes and ipods/iphones/touch devices, has set the standard of touch-UI and dominates the portable multimedia world. Almost nobody (but me and some other exotic people) appear to resist.
- Microsoft is preparing its Windows 7 which is supposed to offer similar experiences based on touch technology, but more in the stationary Mediacenter HTPC domain
- Logitech / Squeezebox had recent success in home audio networked systems. NOT because of the server software, but due to their approach of innovative hardware and the user interface implemented there
- JRiver's MC IMO is the best multimedia player, especially for music, and tagging / data based system, but it has one major weakness compared to the above mentioned giants: missing hardware that directly supports MC in the best possible way. Only a small group of expert users can be reached with approaches like Netremote.
Sadly, I have raised a wish for hardware in this forum several years ago, but nothing essential really happened.
JRiver have now prioritized to open up their own music shop, which I don't really care so much about.
Wouldn't it NOW be FINALLY time that JRiver teams up with an experienced Hardware manufacturer and throws a new weapon into this battle? By making all these wonderful software functions available to decent user interfaces?
I would love soooooo much to see:
- A decent device to remote control the server. Mellowares iphone app (Rivermote) is very promising, but in another post he mentions on his site that the library scan, which everybody asks for, is difficult to implement especially because, unlike Apple, he is not the owner of the server software.
- A web UI which has similar functionality to an iphone. I would right away buy one of those bigger touchscreens (like the 19'' iiyama ProLite T1930) and use it as a frontend to scan through my library via genre / cover arts. For example, I have defined views to show me all classical albums of classical music by composer, but only for those cases where I have complete works available. I think no other software can do this but MC. I hate the idea that some day I will want to change over to Microsoft Media Center
- A PMP (portable media player) that runs the same great functions, and has all my 120 GB library in its stomach -without having to care about format conversion because Apple armada does not support FLAC, for example. Today only a tiny company called Archos can deliver this kind of PMP, and their Archos 5 really sucks in terms of user interface and buggy firmware.... (at least when you compare it with Apple or Microsoft standards).
why MC could not run in a light version on a PMP?
If I had enough money I would have invested since long time ago in your company and push you to move into this direction. Maybe others tried, but you have been too resistant??
I would love so much to see a.m. moves happen soon, I have been waiting all but too long.... But I will wait some longer, since I am still very reluctant to convert to Apple-podism or Microsoft-zunism and leave my beloved MC world :-)
The fact that so far the Ipod new generation devices are not supportable by MC due to their designer's strategy, should really ring a bell to all of us. The world is waiting for an open solution - Apple or Microsoft's vision cannot be the right answer.