Article: Roon Vs. JRiver | Clash of the Titans

[Michigan guy]

Fantastic article!

 

I have been using JRMC for a few years after looking at a few others.  Roon was new to the scene at the time.  JRMC was attractive for the reasons stated... but there was one feature that continues to make me a staunch user that was not mentioned - Smartlists.  I hate to build playlists but really enjoy when friends pick songs from my collection.  Smartlists can auto-generate a list from your collection based on the specific criteria you create.  For example, my core "Smartlist" is music that is rated 3 or more stars (most tools only let you "favorite" something), from 7 specific genre types, songs must be shorter than 8 minutes and that have not been played in two days min.  One button push and I have a playlist with 1,400 songs that will play only great songs from my collection for days - like my personal Pandora!  I know that Roon can try to do something similar by using the sonic finger print of your music (similar to Roon), but Roon is just guessing what you may like or not. 

 

Because you can rank songs on a 5-point scale with JRMC (vs just "favorite" for example), you can really tune your collection AND determine what songs are bad/good/better/best on an album at a glace.  I don't know of another player that does this. 

 

I do love the metadata pull that Roon does.  JRMC does this as well, but it is much more restricted to last.fm articles - no liner notes / graphics / lyrics.