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[TigerNightmare]

I've been using Media Center to manage my music for maybe 10 years, from Windows98 to XP and now Windows7. While some of MC13's functionality would break down over time (video codec playback issues, mostly), its primary function as a music library manager and iPod synchronizer never failed my needs and I never really felt the need to upgrade. Then the computer it was installed on had a catastrophic hard drive failure and now I have a new beast machine. That and the upgrade price point from the e-mail I got about a month ago was enough to convince me to finally move forward. Here are my preliminary observations from using MC20 this past weekend. This is mostly a list of minor niggling issues I'd think/hope you would want to iron out, so please read each thing carefully. I used 20.0.10, since that was the version made available on the main download page.

1. I got an error message that says "Failure Copying License: Install Wizard can only perform a portable install if you have a valid license on this machine." It's really stupid that you can't do a fresh, portable install unless you already have a complete installation. In the future, you should be able to tell the install program where your license key file is, if it cannot find it on its own. I would have liked a nice and clean, self-contained installation that I can simply drop into any hard drive to recover/back up my install in the case of a catastrophic failure, which has happened to my old install of MC13, lost forever to a fried hard drive. After I installed, I tried to install another portable copy to another folder, but I got the same error message. It wasn't until I opened the program from the regular install a second time that a prompt to enter the license key appeared and I was able to do the portable install. Feels cluttery, unintuitive and inconvenient.

2. The first thing that happens after launching the program for the first time is that it starts importing everything it can find. Maybe most people won't mind this, but I do. I have several hard drives with a few terabytes of data and I don't want to have to wait for it to scan all of it when all I want to manage is music and photos in specific locations. Please change this so the user gets prompted whether or not they run a full scan. People have iTunes if they want to not have control. Come on, this is supposed to be the alternative.

3. I wanted my default library to be for music and wanted to create a second one for photos. The default option is for a library server that needs an access key or a URL entered into the blank. I'm unfamiliar with this feature and there's no help button to explain what this is about. Local Library, which I think should be the default option, needs a library location. Instead of giving the user a library location automatically that they can change if they want (I specifically remember MC13 doing it this way), you have to choose an empty directory when my brain wants to choose the directory where the media files are. I ended up creating my libraries in C:\MC20\libraries\Music and C:\MC20\libraries\Photos. Since I can't delete or rename the default "Main Library", I ended up deleting the Music one. There's nothing really wrong with it per se, it's just not very intuitive and could be much simpler.

4. After changing the volume setting from system volume to application volume, I wondered what Volume Protection did, so I clicked the help button. I don't mind wiki format documentation, but all this stuff is out of date. Couldn't find what I needed there. Another help page I looked at had an image of MC12. This is just downright shameful.

5. Of the skins, I noticed that Black on Black, Noire Glass, Pearl Baily and Purity were new. It would be nice if there were glass versions of all the skins, but I like Noire Glass anyway. I couldn't help but notice that there was no way to download new skins anymore. What happened to those? There's also no way to change the skin for mini view without going back into standard view and changing the regular skin with it. Not that mini view has much going for it anymore. They all look the same and there's no mini visualization screen to go with them. Sometimes you just want an old school Winamp mp3 player. I do like the little spectrum bars if you stretch the mini player out a bit, but some more flexibility and options wouldn't hurt.

6. Either some options were taken out of General>Behavior>Double-click, or this is something I've always wanted. I would like to be able to combine Replace Playing Now (single) with Add To Playing Now (play now). Meaning, I want to double click one file and have that one file play without clearing the file list in Playing Now.

7. For some reason, the Keywords box didn't have the clickable checkboxes of known keywords when I highlighted a file that didn't currently have keywords associated with it. The drop down menu is considerably less useful and requires quadruple the work to use (click, scroll, click, enter, repeat). The problem went away after tagging that one file, though, so maybe it's a bug.

8. This problem has to be specific to a portable install. For my music library, I selected my folders and imported files. However, the filename tags all start with C:install Drive):\ instead of C:\. I found a thread where someone had the same problem, but the solution that BryanC posted didn't work for me. I put "nstall Drive)_\" into the Find What blank and left Replace With blank and that worked.

9. Hate how child windows such as the options menu have an always on top setting, so if I try to switch to another window like a web browser, the thing is blocking. Child windows shouldn't be forcibly visible if another program is in focus.

10. 3D visuals haven't progressed. Not a huge problem, but I'm kind of disappointed that the highest quality setting for some of the 2D visuals still hit a framerate bottleneck on 1080p full screen, even on a computer that's so much more powerful than my old one. There are a lot of nice new options, though. It should be easier to mix and match effects in the visualization studio. It looks the same as before.

(continued below)

[TigerNightmare]

11. During audio playback, private bytes were at 3 GB but working set was only 155 MB. CPU usage peaks at 9%. When idle, working set falls to 83 MB and CPU to less than 0.4%, but private bytes is still 3 GB. There doesn't seem to be any noticeable performance hit to the system.

12. Stereo to 5.1 upmixing is still awesome. Don't change a thing.

13. I had already had a folder with all the cover art that my copy of MC13 used. Despite setting MC20 to the cover art location, instead of using the files there (and being able to configure cover art file recognition rules as "[Artist] - [Album].jpg") it downloaded new versions of cover art for everything into a sub-directory called Albums, many of which have lower resolution and quality or even the wrong art altogether. I ended up selecting all the images in the root directory and dragging them into the new Albums directory and going through the overwrite prompt one by one to compare thumbnails and file attributes.

14. For a lot of files I don't have cover art for, MC keeps downloading images that aren't right. An album by a band called Kara's Flowers keeps downloading some Modest Mouse cover. Even if I click on remove cover art as well as permanently delete the image, it just downloads again after a few seconds. I don't know how to correct this behavior, besides manually associating each of these files with an empty text file named blank.jpg. There should be a way to configure this. Maybe a pop-up prompt that has a none of the above option that also prevents MC from re-prompting you unless you try to find cover art manually.

15. Something's up with audio playback. Every so often, it sounds like part of a song gets skipped by about half a second.

16. At first, I missed the three Audio/Video/Images tabs, but I like the new tab system that can be stored into favorites. I just wish there was to make some tabs a bit more permanent. A way to lock the tabs and prevent navigating away from them. The back/forward buttons are useful. Being able to drag and drop the tabs would be nice too.

17. If I right click on a music file that has cover art and then click on Cover Art and then View (first file), I get this error message: "Playback Problem: Something went wrong with playback. Details: The file could not be found. Check that the filename in the library matches the filename on disk." This happens for images in the cover art directly as well as images that are marked "Inside File".

18. This is old behavior I think should be changed by now. "Done saving tag changes," in the status bar should go away on its own after 5-10 seconds without user intervention.

19. I decided that a 17 track CD should be the first one to rip. During the ripping process, MC decided to give me an error message for all 17 tracks. They all look like this: Tagging Error: Media Center encountered errors while tagging or moving files. Check that the files exist, are not read-only, and are not in use by other programs. Tagging error: C:nstall Drive):\(file directory and name here)". Each error message would steal focus from another application and it made typing really tedious because I had to constantly click back into the program I was using while I had to wait for the ripping to finish. After all 17 error messages, I got one larger window that's the same and lists all 17 tracks. Then, of course, I had to click Ok on all 18 error message windows before I could use MC again. I inserted another CD and got a prompt on whether to do nothing, play or rip it. I like the prompt better than continued automatic ripping like before, even though I was ripping. Same annoying error messages as before. This time, it crashed as soon as it finished ripping. At least I didn't have to click Ok a bunch of times. But I seem to crash every other CD ripping.

20. Not surprisingly, file conversion has the same issue with the weird incorrect file location. It converts without any other issues I'm aware of and it doesn't even give me a ton of error messages like with ripping, so it's a quick fix. For whatever reason, I wasn't able to get a menu from right clicking the files in the tab marked Converter that has all the finished, converted files with the bad file locations, but I was able to get it from the regular Tools menu. Don't ever get rid of the Windows 3.1 style menus.

21. I still have my old iPod Video. It's 8 years old and the battery has a tendency to drain if I don't use it for two days, but it's still a reliable piece of hardware that was pretty much the sole reason I bought MC10-13 in the first place. I knew I was going to have to delete everything and upload from scratch again. A few years ago, I read rumblings on this board about Media Center dropping support for Apple devices because Apple is just difficult about updates and locking out third party apps and whatnot. So I was worried. I docked the iPod while MC was playing some music with the full screen visuals on monitor 1, the TV screen (I usually work in MC on monitor 2). Music kept playing but it froze and the next song didn't play. I found out a window was buried another the viz screen that said this:

iTunes Data Version
The data on your iPod is in an older format (Unknown) than the format currently used by Media Center (iTunes 9.0.1). Media Center will automatically update your iPod when you transfer content. If you are using another piece of software which depends on the older data format, please update it to the newest version to avoid problems.

The music resumed as soon as I clicked Ok. I right clicked on the Drives & Devices entry and went to options. It's very different from what I remember, at least with volume leveling. I ran analysis on all my files earlier and set volume adjustment to 25% to match the DSP playback setting. Sometime between when I did this and checked All Audio and a few smartlists in the right side box, it changed to 1%. I changed it back to 25%, then I clicked OK. I went back to check and ... it's 1% again. What the hell. I just left it as 1%, hoping it wouldn't be broken and then clicked on Sync Now.

The box in the lower left corner said "Working...", the status for all the files on the details screen said "Waiting..." and the actual iPod had the spinning wheel in the upper left corner of its screen. I decided to browse the iPod through explorer to see if anything was going on, but then it started uploading songs. The estimate was about 1.3 hours for 7,562 files, but it only took about 40 minutes. The estimate said 40 GB, but the files were only about half that. I'm assuming the extra 20 GB was the old files being deleted.

As for playback itself, well, it plays fine, but it's not as loud as I'd like. I would like the option of ear bleeding levels. Turning on the Sound Check option only makes the louder songs quieter and the softer songs sound about the same. I played a few songs and the play stats updated on sync just fine. It's just the volume leveling that needs to be fixed.

That's all I got for now. I hope these issues get resolved eventually. Someone let me know if the portable install issues are an easy upcoming fix or if I'll have to switch to a normal install if I want things to work. Thanks.

Specs:
Intel i7 six core 3.2 GHz processor
16 GB RAM
EVGA GTX770 4GB
RealTek HD (ASUS motherboard audio)
Western Digital Caviar Black ∞GB*∞ in RAID ∞+∞
Windows7 Professional 64 bit SP1

[JimH]

If you have a problem, please post it in a thread with a subject that describes it.

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