Thoughts on Mediacenter
Hello,
Here are some thoughts of Media Center 9.* from a veteran Musicmatch user and a new ipod owner.
Pros :
- The product is much cleaner and a lot more sophisticated in comparison to what Musicmatch has to offer. I would say, this was built by geeks for geeks.
- Much faster than Musicmatch.
- Ipod support is much better than what MM ever has to offer
Cons :
- Quite expensive, although I own 2 tivo's, unfortunately I don't subscribe to the HMO option, and further I never watch any dvd's on my PC, so $40 seems a bit too pricey for me, esp considering that I am only going to use this product for my ipod.
- The smart playlists are a great feature, but I was never able to transfer the playlists over to my ipod. Everytime I tried(by clicking on Send to Device->Handheld etc..), it just ended up making sure that the files were available in my ipod, but not explicitly transferring the playlists over. May be I am doing something wrong here.
- The tagging functionality of Mediacenter is PAINFULLY slow compared to what MM has to offer. MM has REALLY optimized the tagging functionality esp using the super tagging function. I was just making a genre change for about 200 tracks, and media center took quite some time to get it all done, whereas MM did it in a much shorter time.
- Does not read Audible tracks, which is a feature that Ephod has which I use to label artists and the like to make life easier in terms of navigating the ipod. I am sure the folks up at J.River can implement this functionality soon, or is already in beta or so.
I liked J.River's approach to the iPod, so I tried using the Media Jukebox, but unfortunately the free version just kept crashing when I tried using it with my ipod, and I gave up on it. May be one of these days J.River will have a sale, and if the price is right, I will end up purchasing Media Center 9 and start using it. A crippled version with just the ipod support would work too :-)
Cheers,
Govardhanen
[2068 byte] By [
govardha] at [2007-11-9 12:21:47]
# 1 Re: Thoughts on Mediacenter
I have to agree on one thing with your cons list, the price. If your only looking at MC9 for use with the iPod then $40 may be a bit much. But most people also use it to manage all their music files. I have it running my Jukebox HTPC. In this regard MC9 is unbeatable. The iPod support is just gravy for me. And if you use it for DVDs and tivo functions then $40 can look downright cheap!
Also instead of "sending files" to the Pod try syncing the pod with playlists. I was making the same mistake as you when I first started syncing my pod with MC9. See this thread:
http://ipodlounge.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=378&highlight=zeke
# 2 Re: Thoughts on Mediacenter
Yes, Syncing is where it's at.
Also, the first time MC9 edits your tags it needs to rewrite the entire file. It's a function of the id3v2 tag. After that it's much quicker to update tags. It didn't used to be this way. I complained and complained and they eventually fixed it. But if you decided to go back, try retagging something that you've alreaded edited. It should be much faster.
I used to use MMJB for tagging, but once I started looking at the conditions it left my tags in, uh, uh, no way. I found too many problems.
Adam
# 4 Re: Thoughts on Mediacenter
Ahh...There's the root of your problems. You can't. You need Media Center 9 to synch playlists. If your thoughts are based on Media Jukebox 8, rather than Media Center 9, you might want to consider trialing MC9--they're apples vs. oranges. I can't tell if you've actually used MC9 or not, or are looking at it's features, and have only used MJ8..But MC9 and MJ8 are worlds apart.
And after you format to MC9, you can still use ephpod; I don't know all the ins and outs of the formatting--Adam does--but I've used ephpod during beta testing of MC9 while bugs were being worked out with no problem.
dmt1 at 2007-11-15 17:25:28 >
# 7 Re: Thoughts on Mediacenter
Unless they have fixed the bug in MMJB then I would not use it for tagging. MMJB had a problem with deleting the last character in tags, so we users would have to add a space at the end of each tag. I had heard on the MM board that they had fixed the bug by adding a space. To me this isn't a way to fix a bug, and really speaks volumes on their support.
BTW, I don't own MC9, don't plan on owning MC9, and really couldn't care less about the program, but I've tried it, and it is way better than MMJB. Oh, why am I here? I keep waiting to see if they will come out with AAC support. That will sell me on the program. Everyone has point at which they will buy a program, and mine is AAC support.
Bill McNair
