Media Software

[TSR2]

I'm a bit of a luddite when it comes to buying music in that I still buy most of my music on CD and then rip the CD rather than downloading MP3 files. I always found iTunes and SonicStage useless as if an album had more than one artist on a track, they would separate out the tracks on a per artist, meaning that it wasn't possible to browse albums by artist etc. Windows Media Player worked reasonably well in this respect, but more often than not, the album details that were populated when ripping the CD's were wrong, or sometime even in the Japanese character set. This meant a great deal of time spent keying in details for CD's, but worse, from time to time, Windows media player would decide to replace all of your hard work on track listings etc, with the rubbish found on the internet. I switched to the Zune software some years ago, which didn't have these issues and had a lovely user interface, however that has not been killed off and I was left wondering were to go now.

Organising and playing my CD's is very important for me and having looked a various free programs, none of which worked as well as I'd hoped. I then heard some good things about a payware program called MediaMonkey. It looked promising, but I found it went through all of my music updating tags and creating duplicates which really annoyed me. By chance on Thursday night I stumbled across a program called JRiver Media Centre and it is absolutely superb. Regardless of the device you use or format you want your music in, this software does everything. It will convert from pretty much any format to any format. It will sync your music to portable devices at a different bit rate / file type so that its compatible with that device, it even has a "Party" setting which allows you to put in a password so others can use the program, but can change any of your settings / files. You can stream from it using an Android App or using a mobile web browser on any device. There is a view called "Theatre View" which runs full screen and gives you a 3D type menu or browsing your music. The list of features is endless. The download is a free trial for 30 days, after which, if you like it you can buy it for around £35 (depending on dollar exchange rate.) I appreciate that £35 sounds like a lot of money, and that only covers updates within the current major version, but this is really superb. Definitely worth a look and have a go with the free trial. It also does Video / pictures etc. as well, but my primary use is Music.

www.jriver.com

[Vancouver]

You have to go a long way to beat WinAmp just for features and functionality. And it is free
Like you I have copied all my CD's to a WD MyBook 2Tb. And fire up from there.

[Scorpius]

I'm up to date too on the latest technology. Just bought one of those new fangled record decks to play vinyl, what audio joy!

Nev

[SkippyBing]

I'm using MediaMonkey, oddly it hasn't played with my tags or created any duplicates. Having said that it's got a lot of settings I haven't played with...

[TSR2]

It may well have been user error Skip, but Jriver is a much more polished product IMHO.

[SkippyBing]

Hmmm, well that's put me in a dilemma as although I'd like to try Jriver I did pay for a full copy of MediaMonkey as part of my Year Zero approach to Apple software! Seriously I don't even have Quicktime on here now...

[TSR2]

Ditto mate. Its horses for courses though and if Mediamonkey is doing what you need, that's great. I just didn't get on with it, or it didn't get on with me or both (and I paid for it too ):lol: There is so much functionality in JRiver that I'm barely scratching the surface, but the support guys seem happy to help with some of my silly questions so I'm a convert.