J.River Media Center 9.1 Released
Reply #2 – 2003-10-09 14:01:05
I've been an avid user and beta-tester of J. River's Media Jukebox 8 for quite some time (my name is even mentioned in the credits screen !). However, I've switched over too foobar2000, partly because of some annoyances of MJ/MC. I think it may be useful to some if I post them here: It took a loooooong time (it seemed like ages) before MJ finally supported APE 2.0 tags with MPC files. Even though the list of formats MJ/MC supports is impressive (especially when you compare it with other all-in-one multimedia apps like MusicMatch or RealOne), it really lags behind compared with Winamp or foobar2000. For example, AFAIK it still has no support for FLAC or AAC (somebody correct me if I'm wrong). When I used the "convert format" feature (to convert my APE files to lossy formats), every now and then tags were missing from the resulting file. This seemed to happen mostly when converting to MPC, but I've had it happen with a few Ogg Vorbis files as well. After repeatedly reporting this problem, providing sample files (that could reproduce the bug) and bumping my threads, I finally got one of the developers (Nikolay) to confirm the bug, but he admitted that he had "no idea" what caused this problem. Then, he assured me that they "were looking into it", but that was it. Months and months passed, newer versions were released, other people reported this bug (but were always ignored, from what I could see at the forum), but the bug was never fixed. Last time I checked it (long after the final MC 9 was released), this bug was still present. Another thing with the "convert format" feature: last time I checked, there was still no proper way of using "various artists" albums when you enter a destination folder. You could select "create artist/album directory here" for the destination directory, but it would create a directory for every single artist that's featured on a various artists album. I did ask on the forum to make this feature "album artist aware" (like e.g. the view schemes are), but this was never implemented. About replaygain: Despite the fact that I (and others too) have asked it several times, album gain was never implemented. I always got the impression the developers couldn't care less about it. Maybe they always listen to individual songs instead of full albums (like I do), and therefor were satisfied with radio gain only. Also, instead of the default replaygain tags (that are used by CLI replaygain tools and players like Winamp and FB2K) MJ/MC used custom tags, therefor making those tags incompatible with other players and tools. Playback of non-replaygained files was also a problem: there was no gain setting for non-replaygained files (like e.g. foobar2000 now has). This is also something I requested on the forum, but the developers didn't want to implement it. Instead, they mentioned how non-replaygained files would automatically get the average gain of the replaygained files on the playlist (nevermind that you usually don't mix replaygained and non-replaygained files in a single playlist). Of course, since MJ/MC uses 83db for replaygain, the volume difference between replaygained and non-replaygained files was HUGE. Those issues (especially the convert format and replaygain issues) were getting frustating for me. My requests, while they were always ignored, were apparently not that strange or demanding, since foobar2000 implements these things perfectly, exactly how I want it: - Convert format: I can use "$if(%album artist%,%album artist%,%artist%)" in the output filename formatting, and FB2K will create the correct directories for various artists albums. - Album gain: fully supported (and even the default replaygain setting) in FB2K. - Non-replaygained files: a preamp slider for such files is available in the playback settings. Not to be overly negative, I have to admit that MJ/MC is miles ahead of other all-in-one applications, and as ScorLibran already mentioned, its organizing features really shine (user-defined ordering schemes, smartlists, ...). I also like the "party mode" that's included. I still think MJ/MC is an excellent choice for most people looking for a fully featured multimedia application, that has an easy and intuitive user interface (I can imagine lots of people are put off by all the TAGZ stuff in foobar2000). However, for me personally, other applications implement the various features better than MJ/MC (I also use EAC for ripping, Case's tag for tagging, etc...). Whew, that's probably one of my longest posts here. I sure hope anybody reads it.