JRiver’s iPod support is unparalleled (they can’t support the iPod touch or the iPhone because Apple won’t let them). I have an iPod Classic 160 GB that’s never seen iTunes – it’s the way I like it. Why? Because about half of my collection uses the standard FLAC file format which iTunes doesn’t support. The device itself is fine, but about half of my collection is rendered useless. Surely Apple, the “king” of UI could come up with a decent experience. Once done, I was struck with how limited and limiting it was.
I was a little shocked to learn that I was FORCED to install and use iTunes in order to even turn this thing on. To underscore all of this, I bought my son an iPod Touch for Christmas. All of the photos posted to my Flickr account get their through Media Center, with all keywords intact. Not only can I leverage its powerful tagging features, but it also allows sharing out to social networking sites like Facebook and Flickr, or online storage systems like Gallery, and they even host a photo sharing server should you wish to use that. I of course turned to Media Center, which has not let me down. I recently began a project of getting my photos tagged and organized, and shared out to the web. It’s also a fully fledged DLNA (the successor to UPnP) device, both as a client and a server. In the current version, it can do not only that, but you can control your player using and browser enabled device, or ever stream music straight to a handheld device using only that devices built in tools to play the stream. While some of the other market players are just figuring out a client/server model, I’ve been able to stream content from my collection at home to my JRiver client since 2003, simply by turning on its Media Server feature.
However, it’s also a full featured player. It makes tagging music, images, movies, whatever a breeze, adhering to all published standards while allowing you to extend its schema as you see fit. I originally gravitated to Media Center as a tagging tool.
I acquired a portable music player, and of course sync support for that was baked right in, along with excellent support for podcasts, both audio and video. Digital photos became a big deal, and they offered incredible support for digital pictures.
I started using lossless files, and lossless support was added. Over the years, my requirements changed,and the product changed along with me,becoming renamed Media Center for its version 11 release.
I used a few tools, and then happened upon a product from JRiver called Media Jukebox that completely fit the bill, and I pounced on it. Years ago, when I was amassing MP3 files at a pretty good clip, it became pretty obvious that I was going to need a good tool to keep them organized. Books, music, movies, you name it, and the more that I can get digitally, the better. Anyone that knows me knows that I like my media.