by captain paranoia » Thu May 17, 2018 3:36 pm
> The scripting and customization is bone of any application that wants to evolve beyond design
If you want to allow third-party add-ons, yes. Otherwise, you just code it up and compile it...
I do use a number of 3rd party add-ons, so I guess I do care about scripting...
> Select art and details and you can play any track you want
But I don't want to view by art and details; that is too limiting on the number of albums I can easily see at one time. And it doesn't show all tracks easily if there are more than a dozen or so tracks in an album. Scrolling by album art, selecting an album, displaying the tracks in that album, and allowing selection is a much nicer and more intuitive (IMHO) UI.
> I guess you haven't tried MM5?
No, I confess I haven't. It seems to have been in beta for years. To be fair to you, I ought to give it a try. I think I was waiting for it to come out of beta, and I had considered at that point buying a version licence, rather than a lifetime licence. But, since it was in beta for so long, and MB looked pretty good, I switched to MB.
> Mapping drive letters is outdated and you need to set it up on each PC exactly the same like on first one
Since it's a one-off operation, it's hardly a difficult task... And only needs to be consistent if you need the same drive letters on each PC.
> and it is not usable on Android, iOS, Smart TVs, Linux where UNC path handling works flawlessly
And that's where I use UNC path handling; they're not Windows, so don't need to support mapped drive letters.
Mapped drive letters work very nicely on Windows, whether it's an 'old skool' method or not. It makes a NAS behave just like any other locally-connected drive, and works with s/w that may not like UNC addressing.
I only use a portable install for genuinely portable installations; so I can take my music library, and plug it into any Windows PC, and have it play. My main library at home is on a NAS, so I can access it from any number of network-connected devices; PCs;, tablets, phones, Android TV boxes, streaming receivers, etc.
> Initially when MusicBee was released while MMW was already mature project, many users gave us feedback that it is cloning MMW, but I'm glad that they took different approach and made good product and put effort in it
Well, it's a media manager/player, so it will look like most other media managers/players, MM included. CoverFlow/MonkeyFlow, anyone...? But it 'thinks' in a different way to MM. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not so good (e.g. MB doesn't support physical library management at all well; that's when I drop back to MM). And 'they' is just one guy, Stephen, in his spare time.
> The scripting and customization is bone of any application that wants to evolve beyond design
If you want to allow third-party add-ons, yes. Otherwise, you just code it up and compile it...
I do use a number of 3rd party add-ons, so I guess I do care about scripting...
> Select art and details and you can play any track you want
But I don't want to view by art and details; that is too limiting on the number of albums I can easily see at one time. And it doesn't show all tracks easily if there are more than a dozen or so tracks in an album. Scrolling by album art, selecting an album, displaying the tracks in that album, and allowing selection is a much nicer and more intuitive (IMHO) UI.
> I guess you haven't tried MM5?
No, I confess I haven't. It seems to have been in beta for years. To be fair to you, I ought to give it a try. I think I was waiting for it to come out of beta, and I had considered at that point buying a version licence, rather than a lifetime licence. But, since it was in beta for so long, and MB looked pretty good, I switched to MB.
> Mapping drive letters is outdated and you need to set it up on each PC exactly the same like on first one
Since it's a one-off operation, it's hardly a difficult task... And only needs to be consistent if you need the same drive letters on each PC.
> and it is not usable on Android, iOS, Smart TVs, Linux where UNC path handling works flawlessly
And that's where I use UNC path handling; they're not Windows, so don't need to support mapped drive letters.
Mapped drive letters work very nicely on Windows, whether it's an 'old skool' method or not. It makes a NAS behave just like any other locally-connected drive, and works with s/w that may not like UNC addressing.
I only use a portable install for genuinely portable installations; so I can take my music library, and plug it into any Windows PC, and have it play. My main library at home is on a NAS, so I can access it from any number of network-connected devices; PCs;, tablets, phones, Android TV boxes, streaming receivers, etc.
> Initially when MusicBee was released while MMW was already mature project, many users gave us feedback that it is cloning MMW, but I'm glad that they took different approach and made good product and put effort in it
Well, it's a media manager/player, so it will look like most other media managers/players, MM included. CoverFlow/MonkeyFlow, anyone...? But it 'thinks' in a different way to MM. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not so good (e.g. MB doesn't support physical library management at all well; that's when I drop back to MM). And 'they' is just one guy, Stephen, in his spare time.