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[Eli]

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=21158&

Many of these are already included, and this just deals with audio, but here it is:

CD Ripper
-using EAC tech, with online database of cd drives and self configuring of eac
-accurate rip for further confirmation of rip
-ability to rip protected CD (TOC correction, ect...)

Default Encoding:
-encoding to FLAC (compression lvl?) - HD sizes are getting outrageous, so size is becoming less of an issue and this would avoid lossy-lossy transcoding for many ppl
-digital signature of audio content (verify that content was ripped accuratly and encoded to flac from an accurate rip)
-Auto Tagging: pretty self explanitory the only thing that should be changed (and new data base may be required) separate tags for each artist (no more artist x featuring y crap)
-Apply replaygain per album and per track

Network Sharing
-Many ppl have multiple comp is different locations and would like to have access to their collection(s). This would in essense be a small private p2p network (no sharing your files with the world here)
-Large p2p network sharing of song rating. If u rate songs similiar to other, could look for things they like and therefor u might
-Large p2p sharing of playlist (not the songs, just the playlists created)

Data backup
-creation of par2 files for the audio content of the flac
-large scale sharing of par2 files- no need to make your own par2, it the program senses that a file has become corrupt it goes on a p2p network requesting a par2 file to correct the file, a par2 is made on demand remotely and shared over the network (legal??? - should be its just fixing the song, not sharing any copyrighted data)

Transcoding
-to LAME -APS, AAC (if purchased), MPC or whatever, at the recommended default settings
-Direct transcoding to portables

Management
-Dir creation (My Music\Artist\Album\track#-title.flac)
-All the regular sorting by song, genre, ect...
-playlist creation (not based on location of song on hd- making playlist transportable)

[Alex B]

Welcome to Interact Forum, Eli

Here are some facts about Media Center, which I have learned during the last two years here.

Internal ripper in Secure mode is very good, comparable to EAC. It has also managed to rip those two first generation "protected" CDs I have. Normally my protest against to protected CDs is not to buy them. It is possible that JRiver could not advertise protected CD ripping capabilities even if there are some for legal reasons.

Encoding format is a matter of taste and needs. MC has many choices. Lossless Monkey's Audio is integrated in MC and you can also use external encoders with it (I have never tried FLAC, because APE is good for me).

I don't see need for digital signatures. I'm listening to my music and that works perfectly with MC.

Auto Tagging? Do you mean from CD database? MC does that. In general MC has wonderful tagging capabilities. If default MC tags are not enough you can add your own custom tags in several formats.

Currently MC does replay gain analyzing and playback per track. Album gain is just added to MC 11 alpha.

MC has an integrated Media Server/Client solution for sharing music library through TCP/IP network.

Data backup is important. I think that the biggest problem for most of us is to keep backups up-to-date. In MC you are constantly making changes to your music library files. I would love to see an internal MC solution to this (there is already a library database backup). Files are rarely corrupting, but hard drives are not very good nowadays.

Transcoding - in MC you can set default settings for conversions and encoding.

Directory creation and sorting is implemented in MC in many ways. There are also many search and playlist options including automatically generated smartlists. M3U playlists are exported with path information, but you can export playlists also to ASCII Delimited format and edit them in text editor or spreadsheet program.

P.S.

You can pay for it here: http://www.musicex.com/mediacenter/purchase.html

[kaiynne]

I haven't been using MC for that long 3 months or so, but here is my response FWIW.

Ripping - Secure mode with MC has been shown to be equal to if not better than EAC, which has been the case for me, as I have tried both and found that MC has a slightly more accurate rip, many of my cds are very scratched though.  For pristine cds I imagine the difference would be pretty negligible.
log files in EAC are better as is the automated saving in the rip directory, but I have a feeling that might be addressed in V11.

I have also used accurate rip and I think that if media center supported it I would be happy to use it but I am not about to rerip hundreds of cds for what most likely would be an inaudible difference.

As for default encoding, I have tried many many formats and found that while flac and ape are pretty interchangeable, the internal suport for ape files really makes it a no brainer to choose ape.  Even were a great plugin to be created for flac I just don't see a need to use anything else.

As for auto tagging I am not sure if you have tried to rip a cd yet using media center but if you found that YABD was not successfull or not in depth enough there are quite a few plugins that are extremely good at find all the information you could want on a track.

The main problem with sharing database info is not simply with tracking file locations and what not, but with the customizable nature of media center.  As an example, I have 4 rating fields My track rating, My album rating, My wifes track rating and My wifes album rating.  On top my ratings are integers between 1 and 100, and hers are between 1 and 10.  I cannot think of a way that you would be able to recconcile my rating system with anyone elses custom setup, other than forcing me and everyone else into a 1 to 5 star rating system which is inadequate for me.  This is not to say that I don't like the idea but there are huge logistical problems whenever you allow people to customize the way data is entered.

Sam issue arises with playlists, I only use smartlists which from what I can gather is fairly common around here.  but all of my smartlists are generated partially from common data suchs as BPM and how many times played, but they also rely on fields which are probably unique to my version ie. Kain album rating.  So all of my smartlists are basically worthless to anyone who doesn't want to go through the trouble of adjusting my smartlists to fit into their database structure.

As for transcoding and management of files, media center has the most powerfull and flexible interface for performing these operations that I have encountered so far.

Sorry for the overly long reply, but I feel like the last few weeks on this board MC has been getting a lot more negative attention than posotive and I think that the posotives outweigh the negatives by far and that needs to be pointed out every once in a while.  Part of the reason for the negative feeling is that the development from v10 to v11 is in proccess and some of the reature requests and bug reports are not getting the attention they usually get, which frankly is not that suprising or worrysome.  I think we get spoiled sometimes on this board and I know I forget sometimes that I shouldn't expect immediate responses to every little issue even if that is what i have mostly experienced so far.

[rocketsauce]

Default Encoding:
-encoding to FLAC (compression lvl?) - HD sizes are getting outrageous, so size is becoming less of an issue and this would avoid lossy-lossy transcoding for many ppl

Since one of the MC developers, Matt, is also the Monkey's Audio developer, MC always has the most up-to-date .ape support.

Rob