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Does such a media player exist?

post #1 of 6
9/25/12 at 3:26am
Thread Starter 

A bit of an odd request....

 

My current laptop doesn't have much capacity (320gb 7mm drive), so I don't keep my full music collection on it. At home it's connected to a docking station containing a larger hard drive.

 

So all my FLACs are on the docking station. I transcode them into MP3 and store those on the laptop.

 

My current media player solution is to use Foobar for the FLACs, Windows Media Player for the MP3s.

 

But I wonder if a media player exists where it can autodetect the presence of another drive and swith libraries. e.g. so when I am connected to the dock, the player will use all the FLACs and ignore the MP3s, and when I am on the road, away from the dock, it will switch to the MP3s.

 

Bonus points if it also transcodes to Apple Lossless and can upload to an iPod.

 

 

Anything like this exists? Thanks in advance.

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post #2 of 6
9/25/12 at 6:31am

JRiver Media Center can handle most pf that if not all.

 

1) It can be set up to create mp3 copies of all your flacs and keep them in the library using 'Stacks' so you can hide the mp3 behind the flac file to avoid the clutter of seeing these "dulicate' tracks when playing the flac files.

 

2) It can detect when the flac drive is disconnected protecting those file's entries in your library so they will be available in the player once when the flac drive is connected again.

 

3) It can set up to treat your laptop as a 'handheld' player and 'sync' it to your flac drive either completely using all files or based on your selection criteria such as Genre, Date, number of plays, Rating, etc, etc, etc using "Smartlists" you create.

 

4) It can sync most handheld players. I do not know which iPod models it can work with as I do not own one.

 

5) It may even do Apple Lossless, but if not equipped to do that natively it can use an external encoder elsewhere on your system to do the encoding from within the program so that the library can automatically update for the changes.

 

My suggestion:

Go to the Media Center website and have a look. If you still have questions then post on their Interact Forum where the staff and experienced users will gladly help with any questions and provide the specifics.

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post #3 of 6
9/26/12 at 2:30am
Thread Starter 

JRiver's library manager looks like it was built specifically for this purpose, but pricey for a lot of features that I won't be using. Hmms... I'll have to play around with it for the trial period and see if it's worth it for me.

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post #4 of 6
10/8/12 at 6:56am

Did you notice they also offer their Media Jukebox for FREE?  It includes many of the Audio features of the paid Media Center version.

 

Perhaps that will be of use.

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post #5 of 6
10/9/12 at 7:52pm
Thread Starter 

I couldn't find a link to it from the front page of the JRiver website, but Google brought me straight to it. I'll have a look, thanks.

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post #6 of 6
10/9/12 at 9:55pm
For starters, WMP is the worst! Winamp or media monkey will play every codec

The cheap solution is simply to set the programs to default each different file; I.e. set foobar to only play flac and WMP to only play mp3...when you select a certain group of files to play then only the default player will open

If you don't organize your files this way, a (free) program like media monkey can display the library by file type, so at least you could browse by one category only...

There are no free software alternatives that I know-I've been looking hard at jriver but I'm not convinced its worth the $ ATM for me, media monkey (and/or helium for some stuff) and playing through Winamp is working fine. Until I get around to buying a better sound card that is...
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