crowtango

I’m a bit of a Media Center lover. I have Vista Home Premium boxes connected to the televisions in my living room and bedroom. Until recently I would leave Media Center barebone for the most part. I would install OABsoftwares RSS reader to enjoy video podcasts on the tele, and do the ‘dvd library‘ registry hack to take full advantage of my DVD collection, but that was the extent of my Media Center modification.

About a week ago I was searching for a Twitter application for Media Center–which I never found–when I stumbled across a couple of plugins that I found very interesting. One of the plugins I came across was MceFM, released by Atadore, based near Geneva, Switzerland, which allows you to enjoy Last.fm radio station from the comfort of your Media Center.

MceFM is currently in Beta 2 so I’m not going to be too hard on it because it’s just a baby, but at this stage of development I’m not a fan. I had a number of problems within the first five minutes of installing this application, not least of which was logging in.

After installing MceFM a new icon appears the ‘music’ tear of the Media Center menu system, so naturally that was where I headed. Clicking the MceFM icon brings up a very shabby looking, symmetrically centered, menu screen, with the choices: Play, View Queue, and Options.

‘Play’ will ushers you into an even uglier screen with a couple of radio buttons and a text entry form (at least it isn’t symmetrical as well). One problem with this screen is that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the radio button to switch from ‘Artist’ to ‘Tag’ with the Media Center remote. The only way I was able to select the ‘Tag’ option was with a mouse. Annoying, but big whoop, I aways search by artist anyway. After typing in the search term, be it a artist or tag, one’s instinct would be to hit the enter button to “enter” your data. Instinct wouldn’t get you far with this program. Enter will do nothing for you, nor will the down arrow (even though the Play button is directly below the text field). In fact, the only way to get to the play button is to hit the left arrow not once, but twice?. Once you manage to hit play your station will begin to stream within a few seconds at which point the “View Queue” screen becomes useful.

The View Queue screen shows you the next five songs that are about to play, that’s it. You can’t scroll up or down, or get more info about the artists, it just shows you what is up next. View Queue is boring so lets talk options.

The Options screen allows you to add you Last.fm user data and a MceFM License Key. The Option screen is plagued with the same navigation bugs as the Play screen. Unlike the Play screen, however, the Option screen is completely useless. Entering Last.fm user data will give you no more functionality then leaving the fields blank, and the License Key box must be for the pay version of this software to come. There is no need to ever visit the Option screen in MceFM 1.0 Beta 2, in fact there is no need to visit the MceFM icon at all.

The way you’re suppose to us the MceFM software is to go to your Music Library, select an artist, click info, scroll down to and click ‘more’, then hit the MceFM icon. Yep that’s intuitive…(beta)…Ok I’m over it, I don’t mind the clicking around in Media Center as long as I can do it with my remote. The first time I tried this, by selecting ‘Pinback‘, it worked just fine and I thought it was great. Then I tried it on a couple other bands and all I would get is an error message. I’m not sure what is causing this error, it seems like the more obscure the band the less likely MceFM will work: The Sea and Cake works-The Redneck Manifesto does not. Or maybe it has something to do with Meta data, who knows, but it’s hit or miss at best.

When I was able to get radio stations to play I had a couple other problems with MceFM. The most notable problem with this software is that it doesn’t scrobble any of the tracks that are played. Scrobbling is the whole reason I started using Last.fm in the first place, what is the point of listening to music if I have no record of having listened to it. What I mean is, Last.fm radio is a tool for me; I type in an artist, listen to similar artists, and if I remember liking something I can go back, look at my history, and find out what it was I was listening to. If all my history says is Listening to “Piglet’s Similar Artists” I have nothing to look back upon.

The other problem I have is with the audio itself. About ten seconds before the end of each song the audio will skip. It does it on every track and it kinda bugs me. I went to the forum and noticed that someone else was having the same issue, so maybe this little bug will be fixed in the next version.

All things considered, this plugin is worth what I payed for it ($0), but it’s going to take some huge improvements to make me ever want to buy something like this. Since it doesn’t scrobble it is of little more use to me then the Live365 plugin that is pre-installed in Media Center.

I guess I really shouldn’t call this a monthly music review since the last one was many moons ago, but lets press on. I stumbled across a band this month that I enjoy enough to write about, and that’s saying something. The lucky band is LITE.

LITE are an instrumental quartet from Tokyo, Japan that formed back in 2003. This band seems to have wrapped up everything I love about post and/or math-rock in one ten song album, and named it ‘Filmlet‘. These guys pull off some finger numbing riffs then break it done into very catchy if not soothing melodies. There is a lot of strummy guitar work that builds intensity while they play off each other. Overall this album makes me move when I’m listening to it, and that’s all I can ask for.

The only thing that I think is a tad under par about this album would be the sound of the drums on occasion. I don’t think the drums sound bad, it’s just that the guitars sound so much better. At times the drums just sound tinny and out of place, lacking the ambiance of the surrounding melody. Don’t get me wrong, for the most part the drums sound fine, it’s just at some points they take on a odd tone.

Something of note, for fans of such great bands as firehose and jane’s addiction, LITE recorded a split album with Funanori in February 2007. Funanori, is a new project by Kaori 505 Tsuchida (The Go! Team), Mike Watt (firehose, minutemen, the stooges) and Stephen Perkins (Jane’s Addiction, Banyan). Unfortunately for me I found out this split– ‘A Tiny Twofer’–was available at eMusic, only after I had already purchased it from Amazon.

Play ‘Filmlet’ (Mac, PC)

I recently received an invite to the private beta of Hulu, the online video site. I only have basic cable, so I’m very interested in sites, and services, like Hulu. I’ve had some time to play with this beta and I’d like to share my thoughts on the subject.

What I like about Hulu:

The big thing that Hulu has going for it is that it works on both Mac and PC with little to no hassle. I’m also using Netflix’s streaming service which is only available on PCs and requires a plug-in install that I’ve had trouble with on one computer.

Hulu also has a fairly large content catalog. There are some great shows there. The episodes of Firefly, NewsRadio, and Doogie Howser, M.D. are enough to keep me content, in front of the television, for days on end.

Unfortunately, that’s about all Hulu has going for it.

What I dislike about Hulu:

I can’t stand the site itself. I Hulu on a Media Center computer connected to my television and it’s almost unusable. Starting from the Browse screen easies some of the navigational strain…momentarily. As soon as I click through on a show I want to watch, all I see is a damn picture. I end up scrolling down four pages just to find the episode I want to watch, if there is even a full episode. Which brings me to my next complain.

There are a lot of shows listed on Hulu that have only a couple episodes or none at all. When I first browsed the site I was amazed at what I was seeing: Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy. Unfortunately, between these three shows there are a total of eight full episodes. Futurama doesn’t even have one full episode so why even bother? These shows look good on the home page but that’s about all they’re good for.

I don’t think the video looks that great on Hulu. I’ve heard the same people that badmouth Netflix’s video quality praising the quality of Hulu. I’m not sure how this is possible, they look the same to me, but I’ve had Hulu skip and stutter more often then Netflix.

Hulu doesn’t support Media Center remotes at all. Even if I could click the OK button to pause the show I’d be happy, but there is nothing. I don’t expect to be able to navigate the entire site with a remote, but giving my remote a smidgen of functionality would be nice.

When it comes down to it, I really don’t like Hulu. I’ll probably keep using it to watch NewsRadio and Doogie but if those show end up on Joost or Netflix I’d much rather watch them there.