Netremote, main lobby, myHTPC

[DavidL]

BSR, download the latest MusicLobby as there recently have been some fixes put into place to make the MuLobby / MediaCenter integration go smoother:

ADDED: Autoconvert Images within J River Media Center to be MusicLobby JPG format compatible (Save's file to same directory as original image in Non-progressive JPG)
Supports converting progressive jpg, bmp, dib, rle, wbmp, gif, ico, jpeg, pcd, emf, wmf, png, tga, targa, tif, tiff, and pcx
Note: Images still must not be embedded within the tag

Also, there is a DVDLobby recent update with some fixes.

And, make sure you are on MainLobby 2.75b as there were some neat updates and fixes there too (I think you are already on this one).

 

[jwilson56]

As I have often said... start with J River's Media Center and get your library started and orgamized with cover art, ect.

After that you can go with Netremote or ML/ML/DVDLobby depending on what you want. I agree with the one that said that the benifits are that you can have it the way you wnt it and I know you want the wow factor for your system so why not go for it?

John

 

[JohnBullard]

I really appreciate this discussion..

As I stated, I went with MS MCE, so I could have something working right away on the new box.

I had looked at the various other programs, and they really do have the WOW factor I would love to have.

Perhaps this winter, I'll have time to set up the J Rivers, and really look at the various offerings as to where to go from there.

Thanks for all your guidance and suggestions.

 

[jwilson56]

Well as one that uses Netremote I would have to say that it is not that hard to get a basic setup working with JRMC for music and hsGirder/Homeseer for light control. The plus side of Netremote for me is that not only is the package cheaper but it also requires significantly less horesepower on the tablet to run the client side. What would make a Progear or Fujitsu 3400 come to a crawl in terms of functionality in your interface would fly on one using Netremote. Of coarse you have to give up some 'eye candy' as even I love the flash goodies offered by Mainlobby/Musiclobby but am not prepared to purchase a faster tablet with an active stylus pen to use it on (lets not get into running thin clients on Progears for $$$).

Second I believe that NR has advantages over MusicLobbyPPC as its quite easy to take a CCF project written for the Win32 client and adapt it to run on the PPC. It took me less that 4 nights work to convert my Nowplaying from Win32 to PPC. Its really just the graphics that need changing.

Third (and this I am not up to current speed on MainlobbyPPC so it might not be valid) is that you can do much more on the PPC side using Netremote. I would like to see someone do what my Nowplaying PPC version does. If it could handle it and be as fast as Netremote I would start leaning more towards MLPPC in the future. Take a look at the screen below and let me know if I can do this with MusicLobby. The tiny LED's on the buttons are updated from Homeseer.

John

 

[DavidL]

jwilson56,
MusicLobbyPPC cannot do the things you are doing with NetRemote today. It is not very configurable today.

ML3 is in process which will port to PPC. With that, anything you can do with ML3 should be able to be executed on the PPC as well.

As the Design and Run environments will be split with ML3, this should offload some of the PC requirements (at least HD and RAM). Not sure what features that will be added on what that does for CPU needs though!

Your screen shots look neat!

 

[Squintz]

Highjackers

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

hehe, hey squintz.

I just may try to do a "How-to" on setting up Music Lobby with the JR Rivers Media Center as I am trying to do that now with my new systems here.

 

[DavidL]

BSR, if you need a hand, let me know.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

Ok David:

Maybe I'll Instant Message you while I'm setting this up. I would like to make a thorough How-to on this while I am at it. I will try to include everything from setting up JRivers Media Center to setting up Music Lobby as well.

I'm having a little trouble with MC10 and your screen shots from Cinemar forums as well as finding the settings to get the cover art. Also, where is the setting to make sure the cover art is not imbedded with the files?

I thought I saw a post on how to do this over at Cinemar but can't seem to find them now.

Can you Email me or PM me your IM address and maybe I'll try go get hold of you tonight that way if you don't mind.

Oh yea, don't purchase JRiver's Media center through Cinemar (like I just did), rather save $15 by purchasing it directly via JRiver's site instead! (PS whoever reads this must submit 50cents to me via paypal).

Regards,

BSR

 

[JohnBullard]

OK BSR,

Hold your breath while waiting for your PayPal account to start kakinking with the sound of half dollars being dropped in.

Seriously, thanks for the tip. It will be a while before I have time to tackle this.

 

[DavidL]

I am using MC 11 Beta. So, this print screen may not be accurate for MC10. Go to Tools/Options to get to this screen. Note that the save image in tag is not checked. From distant memory, I believe when you right click on a song within MC10 and click on Images, there is a choice to save in tag or not.

It is no longer as critical of the view setup within MediaCenter as the latest MusicLobby plugin now has a feature to limit how many songs get put into the playlist that you can configure. This eliminates the choke issue when the MC views are not setup correctly and dump thousands of MP3s to MusicLobby plugin that chokes the MC PC.

BSR, download all the latest from the login page before we get going.

If folks are interested and want to group IM on setup of MusicLobby, fine with me!

 

[Squintz]

I would like to contribute to the project. I would be more of a sit back and learn while you guys write the how-to but i think that if you have me there telling you that i dont understand a certain step it will help you catch steps you are missing. Also during the project i will probably catch on and be able to assist with some of the info.

Last night John taught me how to use J Rivers Media Center 10 to assign Album covers to my mp3's Everything worked pretty well. Now my next step is to go through and fix all the ones that it got wrong and missed. That will probably take a few nights. since i have over 300 songs and most of them arnt organized like i want them to be.

I havent used IM's in a while but perhaps a Mirc Channel would be best for a project meeting. I have XP's Windows Messenger and Yahoo messenger. I dont do AIM because it always seems to mess up my pc

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

Let me get something out first and then you can go through it and edit it.

One thing about J River's you need to remember is not to select the option to imbed the image with the music file itself

To get the cover art display your songs by artist, then select the entire album (i.e. select each song in that album), right click on that selection, select "Image", then "Get from Internet", then select the loose option and see if that will obtain the correct cover art. This worked for most of my albums which did not select the cover art the first time around.

 

[Squintz]

BSR what i did first was right clicked the songs and clicked on the option that allowed me to get all the correct song information from YADB online. This assigned album titles, song titles, and artist names to all the mp3 files. It only missed a few Club Mixes and other short MP3's which wernt real songs. Then i ran the Get Art from internet option on the entire album by clicking and highlighting the audio tab in the tree on the left side. Then i went to the Tools menu bar option and selected Get from internet. This found all the cover art for all my albums and not just a single album.

One thing i did notice is that one artist. Alanis Morisette was in the tree twice. It was spelled a little differnt tho

Alanis Morisette
Alanis Morissette

To be honest im not sure which way is correct but i just renamed the second one to the same as the first and it automatically changed the album artist names and song artist names then combined it with the existing Morisette. Any duplicates were removed and all the others remained.

I have another question:
What are the most popular features of J Rivers Media Center?

In other words how does J Rivers tie into Net Remote and Main Lobby? Does Main Lobby use JR's database as a backend or something like that?

Also where do the images actually get stored?
I know in your post above you say not to embed the images into the song itself but if you dont do that then how else does the file know what cover art belongs to it. Does it use the database as a relational database and look up what art to assign to what album each time.

Im just trying to get a better understaning of how the software works that way i can start to experiment and learn on my own

 

[DavidL]

"What are the most popular features of J Rivers Media Center?"

For me, the reason for buying MC was the integration with MusicLobby. I also like the Zone control over the sound card that is exposed via MusicLobby as well. MC has lots of functionality (too much in my opinion - very configurable, but that makes it more complicated - kinda like Zoom Player - Zoom added a Basic / Advanced button to hide not used much configuration choices). MC has a big following due to it's functionality.

"In other words how does J Rivers tie into Net Remote and Main Lobby? Does Main Lobby use JR's database as a backend or something like that? "

I think I am speaking for both Net and Main to say that they both use MCs database as the backend for media organization.

"Also where do the images actually get stored?"

They are stored in JRivers MC directory.


"I know in your post above you say not to embed the images into the song itself but if you dont do that then how else does the file know what cover art belongs to it. Does it use the database as a relational database and look up what art to assign to what album each time. "

Yes, it uses the database to find the specific image associated to the music file.