Bitrate

Thanks, guys, for your replys. In response to J River:<br /> <br /> <cite>"During that 30 second period, there is a message that says what it will do."</cite><br /> <br /> If there was a message, I never saw it. I could only guess what the program was doing.<br /> <br /> <cite>"You can turn off auto-import, analysis, and cover art lookup."</cite><br /> <br /> These options should never be enabled by default. If the program takes off scanning and altering files in 30 seconds, the user doesn't even have time to go in and explore the options and disable such items.<br /> <br /> When the program is run for the first time, you could have a simple wizard appear which asks the user to set some of the main preferences (such as auto-import).<br /> <br /> <cite>"The "damage" was this..."</cite><br /> <br /> You seem to think that having my timestamps and tags modified without my permission was no big deal. I have spent countless hours ripping, recording, tagging, and organizing my music collection just the way I wanted; and your program messed it all up in a few minutes.<br /> <br /> The timestamps are important to me because I like to be able to look at the files and see exactly when they were created. And of course my tagging system was destroyed by adding the ID3v2 tags. I can't tell you how angry it made me when this happened.<br /> <br /> Fortunately, I was able to recover from this, but it took me about two and a half hours to go through my collection and determine exactly which files had been affected, and then to delete all of the affected folders and re-copy them from a backup drive.<br /> <br /> I really encourage you to make some changes to your software.

I recently tried J River Media Center 15, and had a very bad experience. Maybe I can save someone else here from having the same thing happen to them.<br /> <br /> Shortly after launching the program for the first time, while I was just beginning to look over the interface, it suddenly started accessing my hard drive like crazy. As I recall, there wasn't any message or explanation for what it was doing, only a changing file count and a Cancel button. I figured that MC was probably just scanning my music files into it's database, but I was really surprised that it did not ask me first if it was OK to do this, or allow me to select what folders I wanted to scan.<br /> <br /> Since there was no comforting message telling me that my files would not be altered, I became concerned and started looking through some of my music folders to make sure that nothing was being changed. Everything looked OK at that point, so I decided to let it finish what it was doing.<br /> <br /> Some time later the scanning finally stopped and I thought it was done, but after a brief pause the hard drive activity started again. This time I really became concerned as I had no idea what JRMC was doing. Once again I started looking through some of my music folders, but this time I discovered that the date and time on all of the MP3 files in entire folders had been changed to the current date and time! I quickly switched back to MC and hit the Cancel button, but by that time all the files in about 80 folders had been altered.<br /> <br /> After surveying the damage, I found that it was mainly MP3 files that had been affected (thank goodness). Apparently, JRMC thought that my tags were inadequate, and proceeded to "fix" all of them without bothering to ask me if I wanted them to be fixed.<br /> <br /> I have a somewhat different method of tagging MP3 files than most people probably use. My files only contain ID3v1 tags since these tags hold all of the information that I require, they are compatible with most playback devices, they are smaller than ID3v2 tags, and they are located at the end of the file where they can be easily modified if needed. The only exceptions are any files that have long names which exceed the 30 character limitation. These files also have ID3v2 tags. JRMC had decided to go through all of my MP3 files and add ID3v2 tags to them.<br /> <br /> Now I know that most people reading this forum use lossless music files such as FLAC files, and might not be affected by this problem. My CD collection has been ripped to FLAC as well, but many of my albums have also been converted to MP3 which allows me to play them in the car. In addition, I painstakenly recorded a lot of my old LP albums years ago and converted them to MP3s (before I got smart and started using FLAC). The last thing I want is for some program like JRMC to mess up all the hard work I have done on my collection.<br /> <br /> FLAC files are not completely immune to this problem either. While most of my FLAC files were unaffected, I did find one file that was altered for some reason. This file was a Studio Master FLAC file that I had downloaded from Linn Records. I'm not sure what caused MC to modify this file.<br /> <br /> The point is, if you are particular at all about your music files or tagging system, especially if you have MP3 files, I would avoid J River Media Center like the plague. There is absolutely no excuse for the behavior of this program. No audio program should <b>EVER</b> modify someones prized data files without them requesting it, or at least asking first.