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Media Center, or formally, "J. River Media Center" is a multimedia application that allows you to play and organise various types of media on a Windows® based machine.
The website for Media Center is: http://www.jrmediacenter.com/
It can prove a highly useful piece of software, allowing you to literally play almost any type of media [not quite VideoLAN standards when it comes to video, but good] including pictures, music and video, and offers extensive means with which to organise and search them.
It organises through the means of a cached Media Library, which means you can customise searches down to the finest detail, and have them carried out instantly across a range of imported media.
It is not what you would call a compact and light player, like Winamp 2x, however, I find the features easily justify the screen real estate.
It gets regularly updated (although the main site is not a good place to look, the forums offer a far more dynamic picture of progress) and it is, I believe, the best general purpose media player to date.
There is an Audioscrobbler plugin for Media Center, and G-Force, a popular visualisation, also is available for Media Center.
It also has plugins to allow you to connect to a wide variety of other devices, such as iPod and TiVO. It also offers an extensive plugin system for when people write support in for other devices.
It can also convert music formats very easily within the library, and it is well known that the creator of Monkey's Audio, the .APE format, is involved with Media Center, and thus, APE format comes included with Media Center. It can also rip CDs, and burn them. You can create playlists, static and dynamic.
It is quite simply, the most complete media player created, and with more development and support, will undoubtedly be the best there is.
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