I am finding an interesting--and annoying behavior with Media Center 13, as well as Media Jukebox 12, as it turns out. I'm still playing with MC13 to see if I want to buy an upgrade. All I want it for is to rip my CDs to MP3 files, and then sync music and playlists to my iPhones (yes, plural) and iPhone 3G. I can use iTunes for everything else, video, App Store, etc.), but iTunes absolutely sucks for music management, the one place where MC/MP are so far superior it's ridiculous.
I installed the MC13 trial a couple of weeks ago on a year-old HP laptop with an AMD dual-core processor, 4GB of RAM, and a plenty big and fast HDD, running a fully patched Windows Vista Home. And yet, every time I start up MC13, and every time I shut it down--yes, the behavior is exactly the same, and repeatable, when I do both of these--my whole system, except for the ability to move the mouse, is completely non-responsive for about 15 second. I am not able to click on anything and make it active, no window, nothing, nor does Alt-Tab work to change focus to another program. If I try to click my mouse more than a few times anywhere within that time, I get a loud beep and the mouse is no longer movable either. Once the 15 or so seconds pass, everything returns to normal.
I thought it might be a MC13 thing, so I fired up the MJ12 instance I have installed (which I thought would be useful until I found "free" really means "free except for the ability to rip MP3 files, the most popular file format, so it's really not 'free,'" and I found the same behavior. It's been a long time since I tried MJ12 (because of the aforementioned deception), so I don't remember whether this same behavior happened before, but that was a surprising thing to me that two different versions exhibit the same behavior (I know they are built from the same codebase), which suggests that the issue might be narrowed to common components.
Has anyone else found this behavior? If so, any solution?
On an unrelated note, I keep hoping, based on what I've read elsewhere, that JRiver might somehow be able to influence Apple and convince them to get their heads out of their @sses and allow programs other than iTunes to copy legitimately owned and ripped music to the iPhone. (And no, I have no desire to jailbreak it.)
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Topic: MC13 (and MJ12) freezes system 15 secs. on starting, shutting down (Read 1050 times)