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J Rivers Media Center Mac

AndrewM

pfm Member
Well I've taken the plunge and coughed up the $25 for an early bird purchase. Due out 15 Feb, very much beta by the sound of it for the next few months, but I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it anyway. So I thought I'd start a new thread ready and will certainly post my own thoughts as soon as I have had a try of it. I'm sure others will want to say what they think of it too!

Andrew
 
Interested in this myself, do you know if the $25 price includes full updates as development progresses ?
 
Thanks for the heads up, please keep us posted. what other mac software are you comparing it to? I have Audirvana plus.
 
Hopefully this thread will be kept live. I'm very interested in user experience - particularly wrt JRemote. One definite plus is that it seems to be specifically targeted at people with large collections of complete albums rather than the 'tracks' based approach iTunes seems to be favouring these days. I don't mind waiting and stumping up full whack either, provided I can get a fully bug tested version. Fifty bucks for an easy life will do just fine.
 
Thanks for the heads up, please keep us posted. what other mac software are you comparing it to? I have Audirvana plus.
itunes only so far, being fairly new to using a mac - I had used an old windows laptop with foobar installed previously, but it died on me.
There is a thread on the JRivers forum http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php about the mac release - sounds like the first release is going to be very beta, though.
 
Andy,

Once you get the hang of it, I think you'll like JRMC. Coming from iTunes the most disturbing thing for me was no "Sort Artist" or "Sort Album Artist" tags. You have to create them yourself.

However you can customise the views anyway you want which takes a while to get one's head around.
 
Coming from iTunes the most disturbing thing for me was no "Sort Artist" or "Sort Album Artist" tags. You have to create them yourself.

I don't know how long it will take but the Windows version has scripting capability that will let you perform the function that "sort artist" provides, by string slicing the "Artist" tag. In other words, you can perform a lot of secondary tagging functions by manipulating the existing tags according to rules defined by you, without the need to have loads of slightly different tags.

Once JRiver Mac is fully developed, you will find it confusingly comprehensive. I've used it for 2 years and I'm still discovering its capabilities!
 
If you have tagged your files with ComposerSort, ArtistSort etc. then all you need to do is to add those tags to JRMC and it will pick up the values of those tags, they're just not there by default. If you don't have values for those tags but want them it's pretty easy to set them up. One way would be to define a Composer Sort field, use Library Tools > Copy fields to populate it from Composer, then use Library Tools > Find and Replace to change "Ludwig van Beethoven" to "Beethoven, Ludwig van" etc. Or if you are handy with regular expressions you can do it more sneakily. But as I said, if you ripped the values in the first place, JRMC will find them if you add the correctly named tag. (I used dBpoweramp and ripped to FLAC - can't speak for other rippers/formats).
 
Up to now I've simply accepted whatever fields iTunes populated when I ripped the CD - its probably why I don't like it that much as most of my music is classical. I'm quite at home with Find and Replace or more complex expressions so I'm hoping to be able to get it just as I like. Its going to be several months before it settles down into anything like a stable release, but its refreshing to know that someone will actually be listening to comments and suggestions - and might even DO something about them!
 
If you have tagged your files with ComposerSort, ArtistSort etc. then all you need to do is to add those tags to JRMC and it will pick up the values of those tags, they're just not there by default.


Am I reading :- if you add the "iTunes" named tags to JRiver, when the import is done, JRiver will pick up those tags, too ?

A neat trick that JRiver does, that as far as I know iTunes doesn't, is "nested" column sorting, i.e. you can explicitly get it to sort, say, by record label (if you created that tag), year, artist ...

When You click on a column it becomes the 1st sort criteria,if you click on a 2nd column, the the last clicked column is the first sorting criteria and the previously column becomes the next level of sorting.
 
Am I reading :- if you add the "iTunes" named tags to JRiver, when the import is done, JRiver will pick up those tags, too ?

A neat trick that JRiver does, that as far as I know iTunes doesn't, is "nested" column sorting, i.e. you can explicitly get it to sort, say, by record label (if you created that tag), year, artist ...

When You click on a column it becomes the 1st sort criteria,if you click on a 2nd column, the the last clicked column is the first sorting criteria and the previously column becomes the next level of sorting.

All I can say from knowledge is that on the windows version, once I added ComposerSort to JRivers tags it picked up the values that dBpoweramp had ripped, and continues to do so for new rips.

I can't speak about the mac version - so I raised a question about this on the JRiver forum, which hasn't been answer yet. The developers are pretty responsive, so if there's an issue with thisI'm sure they'll try and resolve it. One problem might be that apples database is encrypted which might make some things more difficult.
 
Jriver for mac is now available to download. Very much alpha version. The current download is limited to one month and doesn't seem to require a licence number yet. I have just installed it (mac mini i5 2gb osx 10.7.5) and am listening to it as I write this.
 


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