JRiver 18 review, brief comparison to VLC, Media Monkey, Foobar 2000 and WMP

[jp_over]

Currently I'm testing the trial version of JRiver media center 18. Here are my initial observations:

Pros:

• Handles tagging and album art well
• Once tweaked, the interface is excellent
• Plays FLAC & the video files I have (FLV & MP4)
• 30 day trial so you can see how it works on your system

Cons:

• $50
• Startup screen is obnoxious and takes some looking to get rid of. You have to change the settings to make it start up where you can just play your music.
• Likely has far more features than I need as a music player

Observations that made me look at switching:
Media Monkey / MM (free version) made a mess of my artwork and tagging. Also, it didn’t pick up all my files. I’ve heard of folks having great success with MM, however I just got tired of fighting it.

Windows Media Player does not play FLAC and also made a mess of my files (even when ripped to WMA format). In short, I was always fixing a corrupted library. I wasted a couple of months on this until switching to MM.

VLC Media Player works great (and I still use it for video) but the interface is too basic to allow easy access to all my music files.

Foobar 2000 – Excellent basic music player but I wanted more ability to interact with album art and genres – I didn’t want to spend the time figuring out how to enable these options/add ons.

ArcSoft Total Media is likely a good solution for video, but I didn’t fine it was very intuitive for music. Of note, I only tried it for about an hour.

Final caveats: I use DBPoweramp to rip CDs to FLAC. Also, I have a number of old MP3 music files that I purchased before I was introduced to audioholics.com . My level of technical expertise is medium so I know if I’m working too hard to “make something work” I should pass on it.

Hopefully, this helps some folks looking to answer the “which media player” question.

 

[panteragstk]

Interesting. I too recently tried jrmc 18 for music and am pretty happy. I really like the interface for music and it seems to work very well. Price is a bit high, and I've got to see how it will autotag my collection. I don't have all of it tagged very well due to it being started in the late 90's when mp3's first came about. Ripping software has increased a fair bit since then.

Thanks for the review.

 

[connieflyer]

I have been using JRiver for a couple of months now, and although a little pricey the amount of tweaking is amazing. I too thought that it was a little over kill, but after using it for awhile I started to see the many, many options available to make the player truly yours. I too used alot of the same free players, but after trying the JRiver 3o day trial it was a no brainer, very pleased with the results. I don't have any regrets spending the money on this one.