I finally got around to trying out MC 13 and wanted to share some of my thoughts:
1. As others have mentioned, the fact that you loose your settings from a MC12 -> MC13 upgrade is pretty annoying. Doing this once and only once probably isn't too bad, but many of us have MC running on multiple machines. Also, doing it by hand means that you're never quite sure if you forgot something that'll bite you later. For example, you might forget to set your perferred encoding format/quality and not realize it until after you've ripped a few dozen new CDs.
2. I think J River should spend some time on a better OOB experience. Thi would benefit us users as well as J River themselves when MC is reviewed by people who don't dig too deeply into it. Specificially, the skins could be polished a bit more and/or get rid of the skins that are not so impressive. The default mini-me skins in particular feel amaturish to me. Also, the built in visualizations could be a lot better. I'd recommend polishing a few and having them listed as the normal choices and relegate the rest to a "samples" folder. Here are a few more specific recommendations on this:
- Skins - I'd err on the side of too few rather than too many, as long as the quality is high. Users can always download more.
- have 1 "normal" skin that looks like the OS. Considering the lack of Vista deployments you might want a XP and Vista skin
- have a few "mood" skins (noire and the like) that each offer something distinct
- maybe have one "simple" skin that minimizes visual noise for those who like that
- Mini-me - Again, a few good ones is a lot better than many bad ones, and each one should server a purpose. Incidentally, it's annoying and disconcerting that some of these skins provide access to functions that others don't. I think the basic functionality shouldn't change from skin to skin, just the look and feel. For example, from Slim you can't select a different skin, but from some of the others you can.
- MC really should include one blade-like mini-me skin
- I think you should have the default skin as something that provides good clean functionality and can come to represent MC, probably it should include the MC logo somewhere
- Visualizations
- one good Track Info view is really needed, I've been using Noire, but don't really like it that much; it doesn't handle track or album names of any length very well, and the "Album", "Year", etc labels are just annoying
- a few good and modern visualizations would be better than the extensive list that currently exist
I should mention that I'm a great fan of MC and value it for its deeper feature set. Having said that, starting up MC 13 fresh it doesn't scream any critical reasons to upgrade over MC 12 (nudge, nudge, iPhone support). Similarly, if I was someone that had never used MC and started it up to evaluate it I think it would superficially not impress me. Until I spent the time digging into it I wouldn't see anything to really get my attention.
