No opinion change on BeyondTV. I like it. I wish the remote control interface was more responsive — not sure how to solve that. Maybe for the TV I use this on the Firefly remote would be better? Dunno. Anyway, it is a perfectly reasonable PVR. Better than ReplayTV especially since it is dual tuner. I haven’t figured out ShowSqueeze yet, but, there is always more time in the future, right?
I spent a bunch of time playing with Meedio this weekend. I have determined that for both Music and Videos it is best to just remove (via the configuration program) the default My Videos and Music Library and replace them with “Media File Browser” (or whatever it is called). Using the “File Browser” you can see the actual directory structure. Using this I setup my MP3 directory as
Artist
Album
Album
I put a jpg file in each artist directory and one in each album directory. Now the system is based on directory structure instead of on the tags. I prefer being based on directory structure instead of tags not because I don’t tag my MP3s (my MP3s are very well tagged) but because the “Artist” on MP3s varies… a single album often has multiple arts, on a normal album artist can change from track to track. This annoys me because I want to pick my music by the Artist then Album, but I don’t want to do things different if it is a compilation album, soundtrack, whatever. This has always been my preference and no media program seems to get this right (at least not that I have used)… except one.
I wrote a program a while back (that I still use) called Jookie. I will have to get it posted to my web site. Jookie helps you pick from with your music, but it doesn’t actually play music — it uses Winamp to play the actual music. It just reads the directory structure every time and assumes you have things setup in Artist / Album structure. You double click an album and it either queue it or plays the album. If you choose you can also drill down to the song and play or queue the song. This is a very simple program but it works great. One nice feature that I made part of Jookie is a TiVo-like jump forward 30 seconds, jump back 7 seconds feature. This is nice when you are listening to recorded radio shows that don’t have commercials snipped out.