I'm a new Media Center user. In fact, I am still within the 30 day trial of MC 9.1. I am considering switching
from Windows Media Player 9, but there are a few questions I have before I spend the money.
1. When transferring tracks to an audio player, MC9.1 won't transcode to the target bitrate if the source file was encoded with the same filetype. For example, most of my tracks were ripped to lossless WMA and when transferring tracks to my portable player (Nex II - the compact flash card shows up as an external drive on my system and both MC9.1 and WMP9 recognize it as such) I'd like it to transcode them to 128Kbps WMA. The WMA files don't get transcoded, only the MP3s. WMP9 handles this just fine. However, I'd really like to have all tracks over 128 Kbps transcoded to 128 Kbps WMA and all tracks 128 Kbps or under (both MP3 and WMA) left untouched. WMP9 will transcode all files, even my 128 Kbps MP3s and 64 Kbps WMAs.
2. Album art - many times MC9.1 gets the wrong cover. I seem to have a higher percentage of correct matches with WMP9.
3. MC9.1 isn't as stable as WMP9. It crashes much more frequently. Come to think of it, WMP9 hasn't crashed on my system ever since I installed the final release. The MC9.1 crashes are not that frequent, so I can live with it.
Many of the crashes occurred while MC9.1 was left to "analyze audio" on my large collection (over 20,000 tracks). It still crashes during other tasks, but I wasn't in QA mode and paying attention to what was going on at the
time. Next time I'll try to pay better attention and report back. BTW, I've noticed a few odd dialogs with asian character strings in the message boxes. Are your string tables messed up? Or is this coded overseas and translated to english (and some of the strings were missed).
4. MC9.1 doesn't handle tracks with multiple artists. Instead, you either get only one of the artists listed or you get multiple names separated with a '/' character, but still recorded in the library as a single artist entry.
WMP9 handles multiple artists pretty well. A track can have multiple artists listed if each name is separated with a semi-colon ';'. The Santana albums "Supernatural" and "Shaman" have several tracks credited to multiple artists, however, MC9.1 lists only Santana. So if I try to do a search for 'Dido' (she is given co-credit for track 12 of "Shaman"), she will only appear with her own albums, not Santana's.
5. MC9.1 can't handle 'OR' boolean relationships when creating auto smartlists. For example, I'd like to create an auto smartlist using the genre "electronica and dance" sorted randomly. However, I'd like to add a few artists whose albums have been classified as "rock". A good example is Brian Eno. If you use AMG, Gracenote/CDDB, freeDB, etc. to automatically get the track info, most of them assign Brian Eno album's genre as "rock" and I generally don't like to override them. Anyhow, I'd like to create an auto smartlist that includes the genre "electronica and dance" OR (also includes) artists "Brian Eno", "Robert Fripp", "Brand X", Stereolab, etc. It makes a nice electronic rock mix. There are other examples of OR relationships that would also be useful. For an example of this check out SIREN Jukebox (I was the project manager for that now-discontinued app). Other than this, MC9.1's auto smartlists are very good -- much better than WMP9's.
6. MC9.1 does not display album information like I get with WMP9. It does display artist information from AMG within the 'Playing Now' tree. I can surf to the album information from there. I would like it if these links were available from the Media Library, so I wouldn't have to play the tracks to access this information.
7. The auto size columns now feature sets the width to the widest record. WMP9 does some sort of averaging so a couple extra long strings don't set the column width so wide. It would be nice if MC9.1 would do this kind of averaging also.
That's it for now. If I don't get any responses to the questions and comments above, I will try breaking them into separate messages so they can spawn there own threads. However, since it is my first message, I thought it best to start out with a list. One more thing - if I do decide to purchase Media Center, should I wait until 10.0 ships? I only have about 12 days left on my trial and I've put a lot of time into transitioning the library from WMP9 to MC9.1 (even though they seem to co-exist pretty well). If I purchase MC9.1, will I have to pay for an upgrade to 10.0 when it is available?
Thanks,
Gregg Plummer
Author
Topic: questions/comments from new MC9.1 user (Read 2319 times)