Prismiq Media Player
The first attempt was with a product called Prismiq media player, but it had several shortcomings.
- It only plays playlists, so you can't browse your collection without making a whole mess of playlists. (one per artist?, one per album?, one per genre?) The only way to make these playlists with Prismiq was to drag and drop. To get around this I created an Excel workbook that reads all the filenames and create playlists based on criteria, but they are not dynamic. To refresh the playlists the list of files had to be pulled into Excel then the playlists had to be recreated.
- The automatic playlists were grouped by the folder containing the song files. In my case this was the album name. There is nothing more useless than trying to find a song by browsing through a list of album names.
- The program on the desktop tended to gobble up processing resources even when the music wasn't playing.
- The connection between the device and the computer was tenuous at best. If no one was logged on to the computer, it wouldn't work. If someone else logged on while music was playing it either hicupped or stopped working. The only way I could find to fix this was to reboot the computer.
TiVo now offers the ability to play content from your computer on your TV through the TiVo box. All I needed to do was get a USB network adaptor and download the program from TiVo. After working through some issues with the Windows Registry I was up and running. The TiVo desktop simply points to a folder that you specify and you browse the music using the computer's file system.
Galleon
I came across Galleon while I was trying to get the TiVo Desktop program to work properly. Galleon is a freeware Java program that performs the same functions as the TiVo Desktop, but has some important added features. There are several "apps" available that can do everything from stream music and photos to check weather reports and movie listings.
There are several ways to listen to your music using Galleon.
- The Music app allows you to view and play your music using the system folders (just like TiVo)
- The Music Organizer app allows you to view and play your music using data from the ID3 tags. For example, if you choose to view your music by genre then artist Galleon will create folders for each Genre and inside these folders will be a folder for each Artist. This does not effect the actual files but creates an interface that is eaisier to navigate.
- The iTunes app allows you to view and play your iTunes playlists. This is particularly exciting if you have smart playlists defined in iTunes.
Categories: music
