With its transparency-enabled menus, J. River Media Center is pleasing to the eye, compared to all the media players reviewed. Apart from the aesthetic pleasure derived from the application, the user can throw any kind of media file at it, and it will perform. Since it is an all-encompassing media center, you can hook up your TV tuner card to it and record shows. It supports the iPod and any generic portable media player. If you buy songs from an online store, it steps in to help with support for stores like iTunes, Amazon and Audible.

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Rip and burn COs with the click of a button, sync camera photos and scanned images into your library. Streaming media, whether its from a machine on your network or the Internet, is efficiently handled. There are tabs for each media type-audio, video and images. It reads the 103 tag, for instance, of the song added and sorts it into the appropriate artist, year and genre categories. Pick and choose from a host of amazing-looking visualizations and skins. With its shell integration, add any file on your hard drive by selecting the command from a context menu.
FOR: Highest score in the categories of ease of use and features.

AGAINST: Playback of MPEG 4 file types has room for improvement.
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