After a lot of talking about this program (J-River Media Center) I decided to give it a try out.
In general it seems not too bad. However it does not come up to some of my very basic requirements. The basic problem is it’s incompatibility with AAC file format. Yes it is able to play these files but that is about the extent of it.
For anyone using iTunes with AAC files you might as well forget about Media Center in its current setup. It really baffles me that a software company is not even trying to attract people from the biggest market, i.e. the iTunes / AAC user. Yes you can get it all to work. But for the ordinary user, they are not going to go through all the hassle.
I have to say I started off using my trial down load on the wrong foot. I had forgotten that Media Center had been on my computer when I bought it, in its 30 day trial format. My 30 days are well up, so on my current computer the only way I can use the program is to pay for it. I’m not into paying for something before I know what it can do. Luckily I have access to a second computer, so my 30 day trial began.
I installed the program that worked well, and started it to search the computer for all the media files on it. It took about 5 minutes, all, but my few thousand AAC file appeared. I found that real odd. I had to go into the options and change the default setting to be able to see AAC files. I started the search again and the AAC files were found. The only problem was that most of the tag information was not showing up. Media center is unable to read the Comments, grouping, BPM, and rating tags of AAC files. Media Center is also unable to encode AAC files. It appears from reading the Media Center that J-River at the moment doesn’t want to pay for the rights to use AAC files properly. This would add about $10 to the purchase price of each product.
I would have thought with a tag problem like this that it would be easy to fix with a back door system. If is very easy to export all this tag information from iTunes by using play list exports. I.e. txt files. You can create a txt file for you entire library containing all the iTunes database information using a wildcard smart play list. However Media Center, don’t seem to have thought about this, and it does not allow you to import this basic from of play list.
If you are an iTunes user using AAC files, this is what you are going to have to do to make a smooth transition from iTunes to Media Center.
1 – Ensure you have a lot of free space on your hard drive, i.e., equal to the total AAC file size plus some.
2 –In iTunes, Go to Edit, Preferences, Advanced, import.
In Import Using – change the setting from AAC Encoding to MP3 Encoding.
In settings, change the Bit rate to what ever is your desired bit rate.
3 –Back in the iTunes Library select all your AAC files, Right mouse click and select “Convert selection to MP3”. This could take a very long time depending on how many files you have. Your new MP3 files will have what ever bit rate you put in the previous step.
4 – You can now import these files into Media Center and all but the ratings will appear in the file tag information.
5- To transfer your ratings create 5 play lists in Media Center, called 5 Star, 4 Star, 3 Star, 2 Star and 1 Star. Open up iTunes and create smart play lists of 5,4,3,2,& 1 star play lists.
Highlight, drag and drop the files from iTunes smart play lists across to Media Centers rating play lists. You can then manually into the play lists in Media center, highlight all the files in the play list and select the required rating.
Personally, I didn’t jell with the user interface. I found things difficult to find. Graphically I found it trying to show too much. It made it confusing and hard to see what I was looking for. On comparison to the graphic interface of iTunes and Media Center, iTunes is much easier to find your way around.
I do like some of the add on tasks that Media Center can do, in comparison to Winamp or iTunes.
Obviously liking or not liking a software program can be a personal thing. If I was starting from scratch with digital music, I believe Media Center would be a real go. Unfortunately as I’ve got some hangovers from AAC and iTunes it makes it real difficult for me to transfer over to Media Center.
Brian