Slightly Confused

[nightwalker]

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't so much running down JRiver, it's a fine app for it's intended purpose, just that it's way more than is/should be needed for simple audio playback. I suppose I should have specified it was bloatware for it's intended HomeSeer purpose.

I know I have a large library and that's probably part of my problem. I still have the first album I bought in 1962 with my allowance. The wife being a musician/teacher add greatly to that, I'm not sure what to do about it beyond breaking it into parts and only giving access to some of the library. Seems silly considering what I use now is a music player plug-in that's an add on to my PVR. It fits my needs as far as operation goes. It works well, does multi zone, scans the files in under a minute, shows ID3 tag information some others can't, including album art and is simple enough that guests can pick up a remote, play a song of their choosing with virtually no instruction needed. The only thing I don't have is the ability to put that kind of simplicity of operation and design onto the screen of HST.

It's almost sad considering the state of automation these days. I mean I can tell you what the temperature of my hot water is and ambient temps of any room in the house and outside, who's at the front door/back door, who's home at any given time, what lights are on or off, be advised of everything from reminders, to local news and weather and gas prices, be woken in the mornings with music and have the house shut down and secured at night,

I just can't play a few simple songs without a 65+meg app, plus whatever the plug-in is and associated memory/CPU usage.

So far most everything I've looked at is trying to be all things to all people and making the app way to complex in the offing.

My personal opinion is HomeSeer would be better off writing their own and stop trying to tie into something not really written for it's purpose, doing it that way they will always be at the mercy of the other app. There are thousands of apps that make and Rip CD's, tag the library, make and edit play-lists, catalog music, let them do what they all do best. HomeSeer just needs to play it, that's all.

[Rick Tinker]

My conclusions boiled down to one thing. If you're strictly looking for a multi zone audio player for HomeSeer this is IMHO bloatware. In short it takes over all audio/video/picture viewing to itself. It is possible to go in and dis-associate file types. It does want to make changes to the ID3 tags of the music collection, not something I allow, it complained at every turn that the library was marked read only and it could not make changes, thank goodness. It also took over 6 hours to read the library, I don't know how often it tries to do that but once was more than enough.

I don't know of a single media player program that does not attempt to associate itself to all of the file types that it knows how to handle. Microsoft, WinAMP, iTunes - all of them do that. Same for Tag editing - they all have options to allow or disallow the program to do that. There is nothing you posted here that is different from J River to the other programs - perhaps J River's defaults are different, but I don't think so.

If I were to enable the feature allowing the ID3 tags to be modified, it would be with J River as I do not trust the "logic" behind matching a song to its information in any of the other players.

[Rick Tinker]

My personal opinion is HomeSeer would be better off writing their own and stop trying to tie into something not really written for it's purpose, doing it that way they will always be at the mercy of the other app. There are thousands of apps that make and Rip CD's, tag the library, make and edit play-lists, catalog music, let them do what they all do best. HomeSeer just needs to play it, that's all.

We did that with WAV files - HomeSeer just plays them. However, you are completely wrong in your belief that we should be writing an audio player. There are codecs, audio compression algorithms, song tags, playlist type, etc. to deal with - it would consume all of our time and we would not be able to focus on what our product is - home automation. The reason J River appears large to you is because you are looking for a simple player where none exists - they all handle video and streaming media these days. They are all very large - WinAMP perhaps being the smallest I have seen. It is BY FAR better that we support integration of these apps into HomeSeer rather than trying to do one ourselves. What if you were an ardent iTunes user, but Billy Ray was a big time WMP user, and both of you asked for the HomeSeer Media Player to support reading your existing library from iTunes or WMP - which would we choose?

If you really care that an app is 65MB with today's 640GB hard drives in computers, then I suspect your system is grossly underpowered and straining to do anything well. I myself have a bit of a weak system for my HomeSeer setup, but I have some 14 plug-ins including J River, which has 3 zones in it, and it works fine for my needs and I still have 56GB of free space available on a 4 year-old computer! Yes, it also takes a lot of RAM, but I have a 10,000 song library it is managing. I also see Firefox on my development machine taking 780MB of memory, but I am not complaining to Mozilla about that - I have 3 windows with about 25 pages open, so yes that is going to take a lot of memory.

If you want a simple player, then go check out some freeware audio players, but make sure they have a .NET or COM interface so you can write scripts to control it because I suspect nobody is going to write a plug-in for them.

[nightwalker]

Hmm, I had to go back and look to see what I was talking about from back in July.

I'm not running down JRiver or anything else that wants to provide all that functionality. What I was trying to say is unless a "media player" app can be controlled and show all it's media via HST then a lot of that code is just waste. You're right and I don't care how much space something is taking up, that's just storage, what does concern me in this age of getting things on less powerful machines to save energy is the amount of CPU use that is wasted. Maybe I'm all wet and none gets wasted as long as you don't call for that feature.

I beg to differ but there are plug-ins that do exactly what i want, just not for HomeSeer. The one I use is a plug-in for my PVR, written by a HomeSeer user I met on these forums a few years ago. It's extremely simple, plays mp3's period, no tagging, no playlists, it just plays. It's so simple to choose songs to play, jukebox style, and if you didn't choose anything it just plays random tracks until you do. It's been my main music player for 3 years now. It has also taken over 3 of my 4 installed HST screens since the family does more with music than controlling devices or looking for info.

My real point in saying HS would be better off writing their own player was so that they would not be at the mercy of whatever program they tied into. The current example of the plug-in for JRiver being for version 11 and JRiver being up to 14 the last time i looked.

I'm perfectly OK with running bloatware, after all I run Windows , I just want it to be simple for the family to operate, without having to nail an instruction sheet to the wall next to the screen and for it to work as advertised. Also I should mention that I wrote the post at the hight of my frustration with the WMP plug-in that I bought in 2003 and was only able to use finally in the last 6 weeks. I do apologize for my frustration at the time but HomeSeer itself had a hand in that as well. I mean really how frustrated would you be if you asked a question in July and only got responded to today? I had that same frustration from 2003 until 2010 trying to find a music player that worked with HS and then HST.

We did that with WAV files - HomeSeer just plays them. However, you are completely wrong in your belief that we should be writing an audio player. There are codecs, audio compression algorithms, song tags, playlist type, etc. to deal with - it would consume all of our time and we would not be able to focus on what our product is - home automation. The reason J River appears large to you is because you are looking for a simple player where none exists - they all handle video and streaming media these days. They are all very large - WinAMP perhaps being the smallest I have seen. It is BY FAR better that we support integration of these apps into HomeSeer rather than trying to do one ourselves. What if you were an ardent iTunes user, but Billy Ray was a big time WMP user, and both of you asked for the HomeSeer Media Player to support reading your existing library from iTunes or WMP - which would we choose?

If you really care that an app is 65MB with today's 640GB hard drives in computers, then I suspect your system is grossly underpowered and straining to do anything well. I myself have a bit of a weak system for my HomeSeer setup, but I have some 14 plug-ins including J River, which has 3 zones in it, and it works fine for my needs and I still have 56GB of free space available on a 4 year-old computer! Yes, it also takes a lot of RAM, but I have a 10,000 song library it is managing. I also see Firefox on my development machine taking 780MB of memory, but I am not complaining to Mozilla about that - I have 3 windows with about 25 pages open, so yes that is going to take a lot of memory.

If you want a simple player, then go check out some freeware audio players, but make sure they have a .NET or COM interface so you can write scripts to control it because I suspect nobody is going to write a plug-in for them.

[Rick Tinker]

Hmm, I had to go back and look to see what I was talking about from back in July.

Yeah - I mentioned my regrets in not watching this forum more to another user's post and forgot to mention it here. If you look at the stats on the message board you will see why it is just not possible for Rich and I to track it all...

Even if I had the simple MP3 player that you have, it is definitely in the minority because even I want the ability to get at the tag information and album cover art, manage playlists, and have tight integration with HomeSeer (pause when HomeSeer speaks, etc.) so I still think the interest level in such a simple, basic player is very low. Plus, as with other Apple "i" products, people get religious about iTunes, others use WMP because it is built-in and free, and so right there you have an argument for supporting at least two players. But I understand your needs are more basic - I was just defending the use of J River - if it is not right for you, it might have been better if you had said that you were looking for something light weight that plays MP3 audio files only rather than saying JR was bloatware. I get that you were just posting an opinion though, and that is fine.

JRMC, the original plug-in, was started by a junior programmer when JRMC was at version 11. I finished it when JRMC was at 12. We had a lot of people asking for the plug-in to support JRMC 13 when it came out without even trying it - it works fine, and then the same for JRMC 14. I am almost done updating the plug-in, and I am doing it with JRMC 14, but I have nothing in there that is specific to that JRMC version that I am aware of. It is bug fixes and a few more features to bring it in-line with the other music plug-ins.

Thanks

[nightwalker]

I understand about not being able to answer every post, it's certainly understandable considering the traffic here, a blessing and a curse, depending on what side of the question you're on.

I agree I probably am in the minority when it comes to audio players, though not alone. I have a tagging program I use that lets me tag and embed album art, I use playlists as little as possible. I have one I use for morning music triggered by an event, that's it.

I never could get my head around why playlists are so popular, they take a ton of updating, especially in an ever changing music collection as mine is. I add 6 to 10 albums per week, depending on available time and that makes for a lot of playlist management. My music environment is probably different than most in that we have a lot of guests, all the time, most music ans and it's a big hit when guests can walk up to a screen or pick up a remote and choose something to play with a couple of very simple clicks that need no explaining. There just isn't anything in the HS world that can do that yet, believe me I've tried to teach after I got the MediaPlayer plug-in going. i had people deleting playlists, wiping them out, creating tiny playlists I had to go back in and delete again after everyone went home, it just got so messy and just wasn't worth it. It was almost funny, I don't think I had a complete song play all night the last time I let them loose on it.

When you're done with JRiver I'm sure I'll try that again too, even if I am only using a very small portion of the features it has.

I've been trying to get reasonable control of music into HS for so long that I do sometimes get frustrated, more so now that HST is out and doing really well.

Hope springs eternal that someday I'll find someone to write what I'm looking for, a simple, easy to use jukebox player that works in HST. in the meantime I just do the best I can and let the old standard take care of playing the music.

Yeah - I mentioned my regrets in not watching this forum more to another user's post and forgot to mention it here. If you look at the stats on the message board you will see why it is just not possible for Rich and I to track it all...

Even if I had the simple MP3 player that you have, it is definitely in the minority because even I want the ability to get at the tag information and album cover art, manage playlists, and have tight integration with HomeSeer (pause when HomeSeer speaks, etc.) so I still think the interest level in such a simple, basic player is very low. Plus, as with other Apple "i" products, people get religious about iTunes, others use WMP because it is built-in and free, and so right there you have an argument for supporting at least two players. But I understand your needs are more basic - I was just defending the use of J River - if it is not right for you, it might have been better if you had said that you were looking for something light weight that plays MP3 audio files only rather than saying JR was bloatware. I get that you were just posting an opinion though, and that is fine.

JRMC, the original plug-in, was started by a junior programmer when JRMC was at version 11. I finished it when JRMC was at 12. We had a lot of people asking for the plug-in to support JRMC 13 when it came out without even trying it - it works fine, and then the same for JRMC 14. I am almost done updating the plug-in, and I am doing it with JRMC 14, but I have nothing in there that is specific to that JRMC version that I am aware of. It is bug fixes and a few more features to bring it in-line with the other music plug-ins.

Thanks

[sjcato]

..... We had a lot of people asking for the plug-in to support JRMC 13 when it came out without even trying it - it works fine, and then the same for JRMC 14.

The HST website clearly states: 'Allows HomeSeer systems to control J. River Media Center version 12.' Look also at the title of this forum. Users today live in a world where they need to translate adspeak - 'Supports Windows 2000/XP' means it won't run on Vista or 7. People see a specific reference to JRMC12 and reach similar conclusions.

[Rick Tinker]

The HST website clearly states: 'Allows HomeSeer systems to control J. River Media Center version 12.' Look also at the title of this forum. Users today live in a world where they need to translate adspeak - 'Supports Windows 2000/XP' means it won't run on Vista or 7. People see a specific reference to JRMC12 and reach similar conclusions.

Yes, people do often reach those similar conclusions, but there are far more that realize that listing Windows 2000/XP just means that the product was created before Vista or Windows 7 existed. If you look at the history of that product line you will find that with the exception of drivers, a basic windows application written on Windows 3.1 will run on Windows 7 today. So stating what it was written for is a way of saying "Here is what it was developed and tested on."

The same thing happened here. The plug-in was developed using the version that was available when the plug-in was started, which was JRMC 12. We did not do any testing to verify that it worked with JRMC 13 or 14 until just now. The only reason I have not asked for the description to be updated is because when I get done working on it, I may have other features or changes to make to the description. At that time, I will list that it works with JRMC 12 through 14 (at least I will try to maintain backward compatibility) but it does not mean that it will not work with JRMC 15 - the simple fact is, I cannot know!