When I first tried out MC I was blown away by how good it sounded, but from my prolonged flirtation with music production I know the value of coming back to something at a later date with fresh ears in order to get a "second opinion". After my first impression I had recurring doubts; could there really be a noticeable difference between my old love iTunes and J River? Was the interface worth the hassle? And ultimately, would MC really be worth my dime?
I came back today to do a quick comparison between iTunes and MC, and I simply can't pretend that MC is not far superior in terms of audio quality (maybe asio is really to thank, I don't know). The audio is much much much brighter and spacious. No doubt.
I'd actually go as far as to say that the audio quality of iTunes is completely unacceptable. It puzzles me how Apple, a company closely connected to and endowed by both popular and independent music and media, is content with such a sub par performance (again, maybe the way windows handles audio is the real villain, but I'm no tech wiz).
What I will give iTunes though, is that it's darn well designed in terms of interface and simplicity. MC, feels like entering some one else's kitchen; it's clearly well equipped but you have a very hard time finding your way around. The organisation feels illogical because of old habits.
I need to make a purchase decision soon, so I have a few questions that are confusing me.
1) In iTunes (Forgive me that I keep mentioning it - I know the software is not popular around here) there is a lovely feature to sort "albums by artists". What this means is that pure artist albums will be be organised together in the alphabetical order of the artists (or rather album artist), but that various artist albums and compilations are grouped separately under the letter V and thus ignoring the artists of the individual tracks. To me this makes sense, but I haven't been able to recreate this in MC. I can only seem to display songs by either artist, in this case compilations are split up, or by album, and in this case the alphabetical order of the artists are ruined. Please help.
2) When I tried to import my iTunes library a lot of meta data was lost. Many songs lost their information about artist, genre and album and even more lost their album art. Did I do something wrong?
3) Can MC automatically keep my files organized on my hard drive? In iTunes I simply had to right click "consolidate" a file was neatly placed under the appropriate artist and album in my library, and thus I never had to worry about my files after I imported them from my desktop.
4) From a serious outlook, how does the future of iPod support look? My iPod Nano is by far the most reliable, (pretty), sturdy and well thought out piece of tech I've ever owned. Thank god MC does in fact support my 4gen, but i do realize that it will have to be replaced one day; it's alive but it has a lot of hardcore battle scars. I'm not impressed with anything I've seen by other companies, and I value objects that doesn't get left behind update-wise. At the very least, will support for say, iPod Classics go on?
That is about it actually. Forgive me if I'm snarky, I don't mean to. I tried out a lot of players, and MC is by far the most interesting alternative. SongBird is interesting, but it crashed hard on me and it seems very young.
Peace out
