I started with MC7 and audio. After ripping and cataloguing my cd collection (mainly classical and new age) it turned out, that I am not such a music aficionado as I imagined: I do no listen to music 24 hours a day, maybe 1 or 2 hours and not every day.
I am more kind of a visual guy and real image junkie, I can drink the athmosphere of a landscape or artwork the same way as other people drink red wine. So as MJ8 developed into MC9 I added images. I do not take many pictures myself, but I put together a fairly large collection of about 10'000 images from the internet (divided in artworks, architecture and landscapes).
MC9 is great as it gives me an easy way to tag and organize my image collection very easily and allows me to create music/slideshow playlists easily. Most image viewers on the market are still tree oriented and not tag oriented.
I also liked TV and Web radio integration, but they are in a way too complex to handle and don't integrate very well with the rest of the product. I would expect from a TV channel scanner to automatically name the channels with their official name and select the optimal channel. And about web radio, well there were plenty of complains already.
I tried Hairstyle and different remote controls such as IRman and X10 Mouse Remote, but they are too clunky to use efficiently. Response to remote commands is either too fast or too slow and very limited although now (without the need of Girder) quite easy to setup.
Concerning images, it still has some limitations. Basically I can only catalog them, run slide shows and put them on a web server. I cannot use my images as screen saver, wallpaper cycling, cannot save a slideshow to an independent exe file, burn it to a cd and share it with others, such as an autorun slideshow on a cd with some nice startup menu and settings. I have to use other apps for that, but then I loose all the tagging information. And for my screen saver and wallpaper I need to manage another set of images. That's double work!
I feel J River should split development and build a very strong, sharable database oriented Media Center back end with different front end tools to integrate for different needs. This frontend tools could be developed independently and also sold separately. So the idea of "One for all" would change into something like "One supporting many". I also feel product differentiation would add revenues to J River, as people would buy what they want to integrate and having an excellent back end would be willing to pay higher prices. I feel the value of MC9.1 is far over 100 US if all components would be as perfect as possible. But then again, not everybody needs or wants everything.
I also noticed that enthusiasm for developing plugins and other add-ons has dropped significantly compared to one or two years ago. There was too much of a zig-zag course as anybody could be willing to adapt their tools all the time to new developments (Skins need to be adapted all the time, as changes there occur quite often). We had plenty of skins with MJ8 and even with MC9.0, but very few now. Mini-me development has been standing still for quite a while. Plugin and Addons development flourishes only where stable conditions can be found. Here everybody can learn from Microsoft.
This is not kind of criticism, I simply can't imagine people spending soo much time writing posts if they would not really love and appreciate the product unless they have nothing else to do, especially when they express some kind of dissatisfaction. And it is also well known that a small minority only expresses dissatisfaction, the rest just moves on to something else. Or do you really bother to complain about bad food in a restaurant? You pay and never show up there again. But if you get bad food in the restaurant you love most and use to frequent most of the time, you probably will say something.
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Topic: The wealth of MC9.1 features. (Read 4513 times)