Music is a big part of my htpc setup. I have a dedicated harddrive on the server with about 450 gig of mp3’s accessible from each of my client htpc’s spread around the house. For years I have been locked onto winamp as my default player. I have toyed around with meedio but have never spent the time to implement it into my front end (beyond media for now). For ripping my cd’s to my harddrives I use audiograbber with lame. Winamp sucks for burning discs. To burn cd’s i have been using NERO but lately i have been getting boatloads of coasters most likely due to some conflicting dvd ripping software on my system (I am still troubleshooting this problem). I found that windows media player, although a bit akward, burns cds just fine, it also rips them good too. Not only that but my nephew shows up with a sansa mp3 player and a few of his cds and wants me to load them for him so I just learned all about “sync” using Windows Media Player, it worked like a charm.
Ok, so why am I rambling about all of this???? Because I am coming to the realization that Windows Media Player alone can replace NERO, audiograbber and winamp. This is hard for me to accept because I am not a MS fan, can’t stand MCE and never thought the day would come when I would abandon NERO, audiograbber and winamp, especially for WMP. Yet Windows Media Player has really impressed me lately, it is a very functional program. Sorry for the rant but it was nice sorting this all out here. any thoughts or free beers would be appreciated.
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