Time for tech!---->Media Player reviews: Media Jukebox Part 1

Review for Media Jukebox: 05/29/11 09:00:14 AM

This is the first of the in depth media player (software) reviews on this blog. I will be reviewing the media player software Media Jukebox from Jriver. This review will have 2 parts. This media player is very loaded with many very cool features.

The first exhibit: the interface:

As you can see the interface is very powerful looking and impressive!

First off, to make this review as interesting as possible, and to set this one apart, I will name some of the features I do like, followed by brief comparisons of such features to other media players.

The most astounding feature is the powerful DSPs:

as you can see you have a lot of audio control.

Windows media player does not have such control. The only controls you have are EQ and SRS effects, which do not get very good perception by audiophiles. I will tell you the DSPs are amazing on this application! I particularly like the surround field enhancement. It helps with headphone fatigue and makes any media sounds more alive. Also note the “peak level” indicator on the bottom left of the window. It will tell you how much “overflow” the song your playing has! Now to the right of that you can even have overflow protection to make sure you don't get “clipping” with your media! It also has volume levelling, distortion, and the Output format section has surround upmixing controls, adds a surround crystalizer as well. The EQ tab has a 10 band EQ + preamp and presets. You can have several custom presets with your own name as well.

The next feature I will look at is the build in file browser:

now no need to load up windows explorer for media management and no need to have a bulky library database like in WMP. This is live intergration as well and you can create playlists from folders very easily!

Now we shall move on to the Playlist management.

One of the most striking features is you can remove duplicates from the list! You can also export playlists to other applications from here as well.

You can also send this playlist to different directories, devices, and even to an FTP server!

I will also take a quick look at performance: This media player is very fast and very lean.

here's a screenshot from task manager:

as you can see the usage is pretty good for having lots of media loaded on to it.

and it has much lower page fault delta and I/O reads then WMP does. I stopped using WMP because of that. my disk would grind away constantly with WMP.

MJ has a very low I/O footprint making media management fast and easy on your drives. even while doing complex management tasks that are "intense" for MJ are very easy and AVERAGE LOAD USAGE is intense for WMP and if I dared do anything complex with WMP and media management my drives would grind and halt and any other multitasking would be chocked like a chicken. My average (semi-idle) P/F delta with WMP was around 1,500-2,300 and for average media stuff would be 6K and peak would be 8-9K!! MJ would normally hover around 60 playback normal and 250-400 for encoding/transferring and spike to 800-1500.

my I/O reads for WMP would be 40,454,860 over the span of 8 hours! Media jukebox has been opened for 9 days and it's 635,813 right now

so you are raping your PC using WMP for anything other then extreme light usage. I/O is everything with media.

And on the next part of this review I will cover the device management, burning, and ripping.