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[DynaMax]

Dear J River

I have just been introduced to the media center of yours, and I was blown away. Very impressed!

I was now trying to purchase the media center from your download page, for installing at my all new mac computer (OS X/Lion 10.7.2), but only "pc" friendly version are available - or - Am I missing something?

Tell me what to do.

Thank you so much and very kind regards

Hans-Henrik Sannerúd
DynaMax   

[MrC]

Windows-only...

Do you have Parallels?

[DynaMax]

Windows only - hmm.. why not go the "universal" way and offer both "religions" the J River "dream" center? In my part of the world we are becoming more and more mac users four the same reasons as mine:

.. Windows created so much troubles into my life as I have spend hundreds of hours in front of a slow-downed, non functioning pc, virus-infected or what ever reasons - that I found it was time to a devorce.

Regarding your question:

"Do I have parallels" I am not strong in either computers or technical english - but Please explain your question, if necessary an advise can be given to me at my private e-mail: info@dynamax.dk

Kind regards

Henrik

 

[MrC]

The developers (I am not one of them, just a customer, like you may soon be!) have considered this in the past - the undertaking is enormous.

Parallels is virtual machine software that runs on your Mac, that allows you to run a Windows system also (at the same time as your Mac OS system).

A number of us have found that with good hardware, Media Center performance inside the virtual machine (Parallels) is excellent.

You can download a copy of Parallels for trial.  It is pretty easy - install it, allow it to create a Windows virtual machine (you need a Windows install disk), and install Media Center inside.

See this thread, for example:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=66213.0

[glynor]

I should add... I'm now using MC through Parallels Desktop 7 on a variety of different Macs and it works absolutely GREAT.  I'm currently using it on:

1. My recent-model (Sandy Bridge) 15" Macbook Pro.
2. A current gen (Sandy Bridge) low-end Mac Mini with no upgrades except 4GB of RAM (added aftermarket because I'm cheap)
3. A first-gen Mac Pro (1,1, the very first Intel Mac Pro ever released), that has GOBS of RAM but not too much else special.
4. A Mac Pro 4,1 which is a Nehalem, dual-CPU, quad core system (so 8 cores total) with 8GB of RAM

In all cases except #3 above, I'm running Windows 7 x64 inside the Parallels VM, while on the old MacPro (#3) I'm using Windows 7 32bit instead.  On the Mac Pros and Macbook Pro, I have Windows installed in Boot Camp (where you can reboot the whole computer to Windows), and then the Boot Camp partition set up in Parallels.  On the Mini, I just installed Windows 7 directly in Parallels without setting up Boot Camp first.

It works basically PERFECTLY in all cases.

The one thing that makes a big difference is RAM.  Since Parallels is essentially running a whole second operating system on your computer side-by-side with OSX, it "separates out" part of the RAM and uses it for Windows.  The only performance problems I see are with my Mac Mini because it only has 4GB total.  I set Parallels up on that system to use 1.5GB of RAM for itself, and leave the rest for OSX.  That's probably the minimum that is pleasant, and Windows really wants more than 1.5GB of RAM.  I'm planning to upgrade the Mac Mini to 8GB as soon as I have the time.  Luckily, RAM is stupidly cheap right now (unless you buy it from Apple).  GSkill makes really nice Mac-certified RAM that works great and is available on Newegg.

One other tip?  Windows is on sale right now for the holidays all over the place.  Newegg and Amazon both have an OEM copy of Windows 7 64bit for $99 currently.  An OEM copy will work fine for this.

[MrC]

@Glynor - have you tried the suggestions wrt. the apple remote, from this thread?

[glynor]

@Glynor - have you tried the suggestions wrt. the apple remote, from this thread?

No, didn't ever even see that.

I'll try it out when I get a chance, but I have a very busy weekend coming up, so it won't be soon.  If I forget and you think of it, poke me.

[glynor]

Windows only - hmm.. why not go the "universal" way and offer both "religions" the J River "dream" center? In my part of the world we are becoming more and more mac users four the same reasons as mine:

Us Mac-nerds here on the forum have brought this up quite a few times.  While Jim (the CEO of JRiver) has not ruled it out entirely, the project would require re-architecting a large portion of the product (though some of this might be easier in some ways because of Red October, I think).

In any case, MC as it currently stands is built around Windows-based technologies, and porting it over would not be a simple task.  Jim estimated at one point that it would probably cost them around $100k.  He is skeptical that they would be able to recoup those development costs (and additional ongoing costs for continuing development) from the increase in potential sales.

I'm with you, basically... I think it would actually open up a huge new market because there is no real competition on the Mac in this space, but would it be a $100k new market?  Hard to say...

[Smoothwalker]

You know, you should not only think about "new markets" with your 100k investment. Increasingly it will also be the question about "retaining markets".
I will have to buy a new computer soon and have been thinking about changing to the Macintosh ecosystem for a long time. It is simply more user-friendly and better connected with the smartphones and tablets of Apple. Checking all desirable-to-keep applications on my PC where I would have to change to a Mac version, it is only the J River Media Center that I could not migrate without using a virtual machine and buying an (expensive) Windows licence.

In terms of migrating to Mac also consider to not migrate all functionality at the same time. While you may have an audiophile community buying your product because of the superb sound quality, you also have customers simply because of your great database-, displaying- and sorting-functionality--and that you save tags in the files themselves as much as possible. I personally don't care much at all about the high-end sound quality your product can provide. I also use your product only for music files, not audio or pictures at all. When migrating it may be interesting to focus on the functionality that most users truly use.

And another thing:

In terms of being worried about gaining money back from your investment, I guess you could also make your product more popular in general by not advertising it as a "media center" only, but also as "MP3 player & tagger", "picture management", "video library" or "TV receiver". As such J River MC is rarely recognized and possibly far less used and known than it could be. May be offer versions of the J River Media Center with more topic-focused functionality (audio vs. pictures vs. video vs. TV) at a cheaper price?!