J. River Media Center: Awesome for music, great for video, and good for pics

[KenR]

J. River Media Center is the best media player I have ever found. It has more features and customizations than any other program I've seen. It lets you rip, burn, and transfer audio and video to your portable player. It has a script language for customizing and you can create smart and regular play lists. You can listen to internet radio while you use it to view your pictures. All this and I have only scratched the surface. Download a copy and see what you think. If you know something better, let us know.

Organize and experience all your media
Music, photos and video YOUR way -- all from a single software program! Connect your PC to your home entertainment hardware and control it all with a remote! Load your music on your iPod while you watch TV! All with one easy-to-use program -- MEDIA CENTER!
Make your media part of your digital lifestyle
Copy music from MEDIA CENTER to a portable digital audio player or move digital camera photos into MC's powerful image library. Make a CD of music for your car. Record your favorite shows and watch them on your TV. More than one soundcard? Play different music simultaneously in different rooms. MC's Media Server can even stream your music to your PC at work!...

http://www.jrmediacenter.com/

[urlwolf]

I used to be a Jriver MC user.
What put me off (and made me find better software for my needs: mediaMonkey) was the fact that they delete people's posts in their forum, and even mock some requests. It is a very closed environment, and the Jriver people (the founder particularly) treats other people disrespectfully. I dare you to find a post on anything negattive about MC . That is morally repugnant. Compare this to the environment (and forum) for Mediamonkey: user scripts created daily, people sharing, amicable questions and answers.

Plus, Jriver charges you every major upgrade and make you beta test for them. It is true that it is probably the best integrated media center (it handles pics, movies, and music), but for each of these tasks there are better (and free) alternatives. After paying upgrades for 2-3 years and being witness of some behavior I wouldn't tolerate in their forum, I left for better pastures, and never looked back.

[iphigenie]

I use it and quite like it

It has the best workflow I found for ripping a 200CD collection, and the remote server side of it comes in handy

[KenR]

... they delete people's posts in their forum, and even mock some requests. It is a very closed environment, and the Jriver people (the founder particularly) treats other people disrespectfully...

Urlwolf, WOW, I didn't know that. I do recall seeing some "strange" things, but didn't pay any attention to them. I made a post to the forum not too long ago, and some of the responses I got (I don't know who made them) were bizarre and irrelevant. I really don't use the forums though and find this information pretty shocking and disgusting.

I looked at Media Monkey and considered it, but ultimately stayed with MC because of its features. I would love to find something that was as good or better with a lifetime license. While I thought Media Monkey was a very nice program, it didn't seem to have all the features that MC did.

So, thanks for ruining MC for me
Ken

[urlwolf]

well, right now I'm in foobar heaven. It took me 2-3 days of struggling, but I'm impressed. bye MM, xmplay for now...

[Darwin]

I've been trying to psych myself up for a run at foobar, but I fear that if I tried to configure it, things would wind up FUBAR... I guess I'd better give a look (I love what various people have done with it...).

[superboyac]

well, right now I'm in foobar heaven. It took me 2-3 days of struggling, but I'm impressed. bye MM, xmplay for now...

Oh yeah!  I switched to foobar last year also.  What a pain in the ass program it is to customize the way you want it.  But once you figure it out, it's great.  I hate their forum with a passion.  Not the content, but finding anything in there is a nightmare.  Foobar's forum made me appreciate how beautifully done this DC forum is.

[urlwolf]

One of the things I did to improve quality was to bypass the OS's control entirely (no kmixer.dll at all). It does help, but I have lost the ability to play any sounds with any non-asio device (see http://www.un4seen.com/forum/?topic=6998.0).

Foobar eats CPU and memory like there is no tomorrow (100mb + 100mb VM??), resampling adds +10%, etc... but for now I'm letting it hog resources...

BTW, are these numbers normal (for a library of 35000 tracks?)?

[urlwolf]

I forgot to mention that after losing kmixer.dll, video played with no sound, but KMplayer solved it in one option.... then, remebering that Jriver MC plays video and has ASIO, I installed it and tested it with ASIO4ALL and my audigy. It didn't apply the ASIO settings for video (bummer) and the ASIO implementation sucked (clipping even at maximum sample size!, stuttering!). So I uninstalled it immediately.

I'm looking at the above paragraph. I bet most human beings would consider it random, nonsense words . This is getting too geeky. I'm out.

[Darwin]

Foobar eats CPU and memory like there is no tomorrow (100mb + 100mb VM??), resampling adds +10%, etc... but for now I'm letting it hog resources...

BTW, are these numbers normal (for a library of 35000 tracks?)?

I downloaded the latest version of Foobar (0.9.4.2) and am using a completely default installation. I'm impressed with how quickly it searched my music folders and created a library. I have about 2200 music files and memory and CPU usage, while higher than XMPlay, aren't that bad: 0-2% CPU, 27,420K RAM, 17,724K VM/Private Bytes when playing back an mp3 encoded at 198kbps...

[GHammer]

You know? foobar is an ok player, good ripper, adequate tagger.
Do I use it? Sometime, not often. Why? Because I like DirectX plugins. Because I like to hear some of my favorites mixed with little played tunes. Because I like cover art.
I use Media Center 12 because it is the best all round tool for audio, does a good job with video, and is also good with images. I can even share pics with a click or two.
I can stream with it, playback different things in different zones, rip, tag, edit, whatnot.

On my system playing a mix of MP3, Wavpack, and FLAC I see 8%-13% CPU and that is with a quite greedy DirectX plugin in the sound path.

To say I'd give up the finest media tool because of some problems in a forum would be silly, IMO.

I can safely say I have used every media app that supports my formats. None compare.
The closest in audio has been WinAMP with appropriate plugins. But I have always returned to JRMC.

[sauzee]

J River Media Center is incredibly powerful. For those with large media libraries, I don't think it can be topped.

[iphigenie]

I have about 60G of music and media center handles it just fine. The dynamic playlists (eg: "50 tunes from genre a, b, or c, which I havent heard for a month" or "50 of my top rated pop tunes but none from artist x") are a good feature, since I cannot be bothered to hand craft playlists