This is just a little story about something that happened today that made me smile. I think it is the first time this has happened to me, ever.
So, first, a tiny bit of background:
One of mine and my wife's best friends decided to build a HTPC for her boyfriend (also one of our best friends) for Christmas. She's been admiring my HTPC setup at my house for years, and knew he was as well, and she decided it would be a super-nice present. So, she contacted me surreptitiously before the holidays and had me spec out a few options.
Shocking me entirely, she actually did it, even after the price wasn't exactly very low. He was, of course, pretty darn impressed. For the record, we got him:
* ASUS P8Z77-M Motherboard
* Intel Core i5-3450 (Ivy with the crappy GPU*)
* 8GB DDR3-1600 (GSkill, of course)
* Intel 335 series 240GB SSD system drive
* WD AV-GP 2TB Media Storage Drive
* And some other assorted gee-gaws.
* Sorry, man. But I got you that sweet 240GB SSD so stop bitching. Besides, you know you'll just end up grabbing a midrange real GPU for gaming on that bad-boy anyway, so what would have been the point?
I chipped in an older (but still nice) Mid-Tower ATX case I wasn't using, and a copy of JRiver MC 18. Alone with a good pile of my time, of course. We did the system build tonight and got it up and running. He's going the brave route and going with Windows 8, so it'll be interesting to see how that works out.
Anyway, the point of this story is this:
While we were getting the drivers all installed and everything, we were talking about some software options. I was downloading Ninite and discussing with him what we should install and what we shouldn't. When I got to the codec packs and other multimedia applications, he brought up what "home theater" application I was going to recommend. Now, I hadn't yet told him that I'd sprung for a copy of MC for him, or brought it up at all at this point. He said that he'd talked about it with his brother, probably in excitement over the gift during the holidays. Now, I've met his brother once or twice, and I knew he was generally "into music and computers" but I didn't know much else. We'd certainly never discussed anything of the kind previously, nor has he ever been to my house and seen my setup. My friends have, of course, though and we'd discussed MC.
In any case, my friend told me that his brother said this when they were discussing what I'd recommend:
"He'll probably tell you to get JRiver because that's the best there is... And I don't disagree, it is fantastic." (Or something approximating that.)
Now, as I mentioned, my friend certainly has been exposed to MC at my house (and with JRemote and my laptop and the whole shebang), so they may have discussed it previously. Heck, his brother could have been introduced to MC indirectly through me, via my friend. But I don't know... In any case, that's the first time I'd "randomly" encountered a JRiver recommendation "in the wild" that didn't have some kind of direct line to my enthusiastic recommendations.
It made me smile.
It made my friend smile even more that I'd kicked in the copy.
Author
Topic: Real-World JRiver Recommendation Encounter (Read 1566 times)