Jplay : Wow

[whose]

Thanks for your response.

>"As a guy who used to manage a 50 person team that developed media players, "them are fighting words!"
The size of the team can sometimes be an indication that you are NOT using the best technology: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/pyramidworkforce.htm

>"Most importantly for me personally is usability. How easy is it to find your content on the PC and increasingly these days, on a remote device?"
MySQL and many free database designs allow blink time searches. If Google can search all the pages on the Internet for the occurrence of any string, then the search needs regarding one's music colletion (even if approaching a million tracks) has been already solved. The competing algorithms and data structures to do this are well known and free. No need to proprietorize this commodity capability into $50 packages we only have to purchase again for each revision.

>"I am personally not a fan of Jriver, having found it lacking in usability so I am not saying to defend Jriver."
I have similar experience.

>"But let's not trivialize what is in these media players."
Agreed. Instead, lets make their functions clear. Searching, converting, sending the correct bits to an external DAC which has been designed with its own clock (if necessary) to avoid jitter, and to make any inherent analog internal noise inaudible. There is free software that provides search, conversion, and for that matter ripping. At one time perhaps it took 50 people to create this. No longer. Clear sound and music help make for a better world. To the extent software needs to be improved just freely publish the source code and let others improve it.. Kind of like communication. Not against making money or competition, but not when it is FUD.

As a guy who used to manage a 50 person team that developed media players, "them are fighting words!"

There is a lot more to a media player than how it stores the bit and how it opens the device to spit them out. For starters, is the interface. How easy is it to manage and store all of your metadata? People seem to like Jriver for its extensive metadata handling for classical music and such. Other considerations are richness of album metadata service and ripping accuracy. Most importantly for me personally is usability. How easy is it to find your content on the PC and increasingly these days, on a remote device? Is there a rich iPad or Android experience for example?

I am personally not a fan of Jriver, having found it lacking in usability so I am not saying to defend Jriver. But let's not trivialize what is in these media players. I think the one we were developing crossed the one million lines of code!

 

[amirm]

>"As a guy who used to manage a 50 person team that developed media players, "them are fighting words!"
The size of the team can sometimes be an indication that you are NOT using the best technology: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/pyramidworkforce.htm

Or that we are, and actually know what we are doing . That player used to be downloaded at a rate of 8 copies per second!. You read that right. 8 per second, 480 per minute, or a quarter of billion copies per year. When you are doing that, you better make darn sure the quality is there. We use nearly 1:1 ratio of developers to testers. If you like to argue these points, I appreciate doing so with substance and not pot shots of me not knowing what was doing.

>"Most importantly for me personally is usability. How easy is it to find your content on the PC and increasingly these days, on a remote device?"
MySQL and many free database designs allow blink time searches. If Google can search all the pages on the Internet for the occurrence of any string, then the search needs regarding one's music colletion (even if approaching a million tracks) has been already solved.

No one said the problem is not "solved" or else these media players would not exist. I am saying there is work in involved and if you have not done it, you don't know what goes in it. A person may have 100,000 tracks. Modern media players do real-time searches as you type. Go and try to build such an engine and have it perform well, and then decide to give it away after all the work you have put in it and then we can talk .

The competing algorithms and data structures to do this are well known and free. No need to proprietorize this commodity capability into $50 packages we only have to purchase again for each revision.

First, there is no requirement to buy anything for $50. There are free software players out there. Second, a data structure <> program. It is like you saying if you have a transmission and engine you have a car.

>"But let's not trivialize what is in these media players."
Agreed. Instead, lets make their functions clear. Searching, converting, sending the correct bits to an external DAC which has been designed with its own clock (if necessary) to avoid jitter, and to make any inherent analog internal noise inaudible. There is free software that provides search, conversion, and for that matter ripping. At one time perhaps it took 50 people to create this. No longer. Clear sound and music help make for a better world. To the extent software needs to be improved just freely publish the source code and let others improve it.. Kind of like communication. Not against making money or competition, but not when it is FUD.

Then build us one. How long do you need and how many people?

 

[jriver]

As a guy who used to manage a 50 person team that developed media players, "them are fighting words!"
I am personally not a fan of Jriver, having found it lacking in usability so I am not saying to defend Jriver. But let's not trivialize what is in these media players. I think the one we were developing crossed the one million lines of code!

Ours is bigger. Seriously, if you can provide feedback about what you found lacking in our player, I'd be grateful. I'm jimh at jriver.

I had to go digging to find out what the product you built was. I guess this is it:
http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/feature_microsofthddvdinterview.html

 

[doclarry]

I had JPLAY on the computer already but was not using it because of the JRiver v. 16 problems. I just upgraded to JRiver v.17. When I switched the Zone setting from Player to JPLAY, the JRiver pause control and slider stopped working, but the sound improved as you have described. Upon switching Zone back to Player, the operational issues vanish along with the improvements. Did you (rhbblb1) experience any of these issues?

 

[amirm]

Ours is bigger. Seriously, if you can provide feedback about what you found lacking in our player, I'd be grateful. I'm jimh at jriver.

Thanks. I will do that. For now from what I recall, it was discoverability of how to get out of full screen mode. And the screen saver which would pull in images from the the web based on my album names. I let it run in our *public showroom* and next thing I know it is pulling inappropriate images for albums called "balls" and such .

I had to go digging to find out what the product you built was. I guess this is it:
http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/feature_microsofthddvdinterview.html

The HD DVD development mentioned in that interview was one of a dozen projects in my group. The player I was discussing here was Windows Media Player.

 

[jriver]

Thanks. I will do that. For now from what I recall, it was discoverability of how to get out of full screen mode. And the screen saver which would pull in images from the the web based on my album names. I let it run in our *public showroom* and next thing I know it is pulling inappropriate images for albums called "balls" and such .

Uh oh. It uses Google Images and the safe search there, but sometimes Google makes mistakes. It's a weird world.

The HD DVD development mentioned in that interview was one of a dozen projects in my group. The player I was discussing here was Windows Media Player.

Ah. I've heard of it.

We've had a team of 5 to 8, working on ours since 1998. We started on it when the Diamond Rio came out.

 

[mojave]

Thanks. I will do that. For now from what I recall, it was discoverability of how to get out of full screen mode.
And the screen saver which would pull in images from the the web based on my album names. I let it run in our *public showroom* and next thing I know it is pulling inappropriate images for albums called "balls" and such .

I was having the same issue at home. I finally decided to just disable Google Images.

 

[rbbert]

How are JPlay users using this program? With iTunes, JRiver, stand alone, or some other way?

 

[AudGuy]

JPlay and JRiver are both very good at what they do. I tend to use JRiver for casual listening sessions and JPlay for when I am seriously listening.

I do not use iTunes, and I have setup JRiver so that I can use JPlay in that environment, if I choose to, but ... usually don't.
I do use JRiver for its rich presentation of media along with very solid library management of my music files, that live on the PC.
I can play music from JRiver using various playback methods, usually I use Kernel Streaming but also use ASIO ... depending on the piece.

When I kick back, shut my eyes and just listen ... I really prefer the sound from JPlay standalone in hibernation mode, it is really very nice.
I have lots of memory in the PC, it has been optimized quite a bit and I disable networking to reduce I/O latency.
I have glitch free audio that is as clear and direct as any audio playback systems I have heard ... I am sure there is something better out there.

So I believe both players to be very good and without listening too critically, both produce sound well worth listening to.
BUT, JPlay sounds better and has no front end skills where JRiver sounds not quite as good but has MUCH better facilities.

I use both of them and have done so for several versions of JRMC and since JPlay was released. I like them both, no clear winner.

But if you are really trying to make a PC sound it's very best, then JPlay would be quite high on the list of contenders.