Media Center
I almost always have music on when I am at home so I of course needed a program to handle music. When I built my HTPC I went through and ripped all my CDs as well as some of my friends and families to mp3, I ended up having over 21,000 mp3s. I knew that I was going to be using Netremote for my remote control and lucky for me Media Center has built in integration with Netremote so getting the two to work together requires little to zero effort. This made my decision to use Media Center easy, lucky for me Media Center is also an amazing program. While I only use it for music and playing back videos that I download off the net (funny little movies and stuff like that, I don’t believe in pirating full length movies) it is capable of much much more. In fact, when it comes to media on your computer there isn’t much that Media Center can’t handle. The feature list for the program can be a bit intimidating actually, I suggest you take a look at it here Media Center features.
Media Center makes it very easy to organize your collection and editing tags is effortless. A few mouse clicks can quickly display all the mp3s, jpgs or whatever file type you are working with quickly and easily and then making changes to the tags to a single or multiple tags can be done in seconds. Media Center also has smart playlists that I really enjoy a lot. You can make it play songs you haven’t heard for over year, play your favorites, play an hours worth of random songs and then of course you can design your own playlists. You could, if you wanted, make a smart playlist of only jazz songs made between the years 1960-1980 that you have rated 3 stars or above. Then when you selected this smartlist it would go through your collection and play only songs that fall under these parameters.
Media Center along with netremote makes for a killer combo. I have it setup so that Netremote displays the album cover of whatever song is currently playing which is very cool. Setting the two up to work together couldn’t have been easier the sound quality is great and I have never had a problem with stability at all. Overall I have zero reservations recommending Media Center to people, it’s a great program. If you would like you can download a free 30-day trial and give it a try yourself.
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October 27, 2011 6:30 am
Love the Home Theator article, I am trying hard to set up the same thing, but what I am actually trying to do is have a digital DVD library. Do you have experience with that? if so can you tell me how you were able to take your DVD library and digitize it?
Thanks and great article nice site.