INTERACT FORUM
More => Old Versions => Media Center 13 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: slikvik on May 08, 2009, 03:24:25 pm
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Been having a debate with a really good friend of mine over this wonderful software that he's never heard of called J River Media Center.
He thinks iTunes is great. Everything I say MC does great he says he can do in iTunes. So here's the big challenge for you.
List all the things you can do in MC but can't do in iTunes. Especially those lovely tagging features that have helped my library no end!
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- Everything with Theater View! There is to much stuff to mention
- Costumized View schemes
- Custom tags
- Tag from expressions
- TV Tuner Support
- Library that is responsive and fast with hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of tracks
- 3D wall, that, in comparison to iTunes, actually is nice looking AND functional.
- Support for a lot of web services
- Support for a lot of plugins
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- And the most important part of it all: A dev crew that is genuinly interested in what theire costumers thinks, and develop with this in mind
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- playing and converting FLAC (which most of my music collection is encoded in)
- custom tagging (has been mentioned above; but for me makes the whole world of difference, in comparison to iTunes, so I just want to underline this ;) )
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Skins
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VST plugins ;D
A big reactive community
a strong contact with the Media Center's developers
an extraordinary optimization of the software (constantly improved)
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Sheer configurability and individuality - make MC unique to your own needs.
Image and document tagging, MC will make a database of your entire media collection - not just your "tunes".
Plays nicely with your other apps, doesn't make any assumptions about or condescend to you how you should or should not use your hardware, software or media.
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expressions!!!
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iTunes is 80 MB and installs sludge that runs all the time in the background on your system.
For some reason, lots of big companies think it's alright to install background crap on the system. I think it gives desktop software a bad name.
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Nice one guys. Any more?
So can you seriously not create custom tags in iTunes??
I think JR should put a comparison table up against Winamp, WMP, iTunes and MediaMonkey. I personally happened across Media Jukebox years ago because I wanted something very specific, namely being able to catalogue my CD's using an online DB (with ironically I don't use any more). I wouldn't have discovered the powerful tagging and expression features if I hadn't bought it though.
I didn't know I needed them until I had them I that makes sense.
Maybe some case studies as well to show exactly what can be done with those poorly tagged files in out libraries.
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From what I've encountered with iTunes, MC is head and shoulders above when it comes to synchronizing. I can click on 1 track/image/whatever and send it to my iPod where it seems like it takes an act of Congress to get it to go to iTunes. Not to mention, anything on my iPod I can then move BACK to MC- can't do that with iTunes.
And to echo Matt: BLOATWARE!!! 13MB download compared to 80 for iTunes? Seriously!?
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List all the things you can do in MC but can't do in iTunes.
Would the converse be also helpful ?
What can iTunes do that MC cannot.
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UPnP
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Would the converse be also helpful ?
What can iTunes do that MC cannot.
Why don't you start that thread on their forum? ;)
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Would the converse be also helpful ?
What can iTunes do that MC cannot.
Eat up lots of disk space, bring your system to a halt, download lots of unwanted software...
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Would the converse be also helpful ?
What can iTunes do that MC cannot.
Frustrates you when you look for basic features.... that do not exist.
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Auto-import
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Fix broken links
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Stream lossless audio over LAN or WAN to another instance of MC gui.
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For music I would say custom tags & expressions are killer. Also FLAC support, if you're into that. iTunes will work fine for a basic user with a static collection. Not for anyone frequently adding, modifying, downloading, and changing their collection frequently.
For video MC blows iTunes out of the water for support of file formats.
For photos MC blows iTunes out of the water because it handles photos.
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slikvik,
why dont you get your friend to try out MC, for sure they'll find the answers to the question asked much quicker. If not they'll be hooked for life.
But i don't give you good odds, as the person seems to be happy with iTunes ;)
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Playing different music on different sound cards at the same time (using zones).
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All of these are great reasons, but i didn't know any of them when i switched. i switched because Itunes would let me accidentally leave spaces at the the and of album names, then when burning those albums to cd, it would leave those spaces in the folder name, which windows doesn't like at all, to the degree of no longer allowing me access to the files in those folders at all. I discovered this after burning about 400 dvds full of music and deleting the files form the drive (because of course those discs compare to the files on drive fine), all in all i lost about 10% of my collection. (now i know the many ways i could have recovered those files...but such is life) This was years ago, itunes version 4 or 5 i think, but heres the point, I reported this to apple 7 or 8 times over a year, the last of which was the only one i received a response to, and that was response was that Windows was not currently their focus, so bugs of that sort weren't being addressed.
Media center addresses issues daily and fixes problem just as often.
Viva J.R. Media Center
Apple can ##@% it.
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One reason I dumped iTunes years ago was because it wouldn't let me sort albums by artist AND year.
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Rename files from properties.
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Playing different music on different sound cards at the same time (using zones).
Along the same lines, iTunes for Windows can only play to the default Windows sound card. If you have two sound cards (audio interfaces) in the computer you cannot get iTunes to play to the second one. That makes iTunes for Windows useless for people who have a quality audio interface dedicated to music playback.
Here's an entertaining thread over at Apple Discussions full of seven people who need to discover MJ or MC: Default Sound Card (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8398549)
The only thing good I can say about iTunes for Windows is that they got gapless playback of MP3 working.
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Here's an entertaining thread over at Apple Discussions full of seven people who need to discover MJ or MC: Default Sound Card (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8398549)
Maybe someone could post a link to this thread over there.
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Maybe someone could post a link to this thread over there.
It wouldn't last very long over there. They moderate.
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Even 15 minutes of fame would be nice.
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Even 15 minutes of fame would be nice.
Someone posted... Start counting!!
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Still there =)
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That link is still there but no replies. Maybe they're all off trying MC. ;)