50
As you would expect from the people at Mediafour who brought us MacDrive and XPlay this is a good solid application with some nice features, but sadly they have already been out gunned by some other players in the market, namely PSPWare from NullRiver.
I dont know about you, but I really dont want to be managing playlists in multiple applications and then trying to somehow get the whole thing synced up. I have an iPod, so I use iTunes, although I did try some alternatives before I settled. The first thing I felt was missing from Media Boss was the ability to pull playlist information from another application or better yet all of the big four media players - iTunes, WMP10, Real and WinAmp.
On top of which it is missing the ability to create its own playlists. Since I have over 4,000 tracks on my computer to choose from, picking from an endlessly scrolling list is painful.
Moving on to the video area, again the endless list of video files to choose from is not the best user experience particularly since the app doesnt give the option to view the files internal "title" tag. Since PSP's want to use a clunky file name structure it makes it a little hard to remember which is which.
I did not try the video conversion tool as I have tried a few others and that all ended in tears, I will stick to PSP Video 9 thanks (even if its documentation and online support is unhelpfully geeky).
The Photos area is again fine, but again the endless list of files or even thumbnails is problematic. It would seem to make sense to either refine this a bit and/or allow it to hook up to photo managers, like Adobe's Photoshop Elements (as iTunes does).
From all of this it would appear that the application was designed with a small number of files on the master computer in mind. Given that most people (me included) are not good at keeping things organised, and most of them have something (like a media player) doing some of the work already it would make sense to me to leverage that and not try and recreate it.
I will admit it, what I really want is a single sync app that will let me coordinate all of my tools and toys (eg phone, ipod, pocket pc, online calendar/address book etc and now my PSP). Surely there is a market for someone to build a basic app that allows plug ins for other systems to be developed.
On the positive side of Media Boss, the Games backup freature is a good idea and well implimented. Podcasts are also a good feature (although why not just use itunes or ipodder).
The skin for the app is good looking. The program is stable and works well but all up its not that much smarter than the new Windows Sync tool.
If you have a small number of files you want to manage, this is a good tool but as you start to build files I think it rapidly becomes quite limited.
1
Let me start by saying, I work with a computer everyday for about six hours. Therefore, while I'm still a bumbling idiot, I feel confident that I do know my way around the utter basics of a computer. That said, Mediafour is crap. Period.
Since it looked sexy enough to download (because I'm a sucker for sexy looking stuff) I acquiesed and got Media Boss. It downloaded and guess what? corrupted file. So I downloaded again, corrupted file. I downloaded a third time and finally I got a good file.
I installed it, started it and it said it was looking for files. I came back 9 minutes later and it was still looking. So I waited a bit more, and a bit more, in fact I fell asleep and woke up six hours later and it was still searching my harddrive. I've got a 40 gig harddrive, we're not talking six terrabytes here. So I closed it, restarted it and went through the same process but now Media player will take an additional three extra minutes (note, 12) to find all media on my computer. I waited another 30 minutes and nothing happened. If this was DOS or Windows 3.1, I'd be a little more forgiving, but we're talking Win XP. Things should take minutes, seconds even, not hours.
This piece of crap software gets a mighty "F-" as a grade. There are tons better PSP programs to use instead. I'll stick to manually adding pictures/music/video as I have much greater control over it.
87
I have more than 8,000 photos on my hard drive, and it has to "refresh" every time I select the photo tab. In addition, it does not separate the photos by the folders that I have strategically placed them, making the navigation VERY cumbersome. On the plus side, I like the auto resize/rotate feature. VERY nice. There is also a preview feature for the photos. I don't get this in PSPWare, which is important, as my files are all named x0003983.jpg which means nothing to me!
I have not used it, but it looks very promising, I have a number of videos that I have already created in DIVX format from my DVD collection and would love to drag and drop to my PSP with minimal work. I will try this tonight and report.
Limited testing at this point. Looks promising. I LOVE the automatic resize feature. I have nearly 40 Gig of MP3's, most of which are 192Kb. Unfortunately at this point I only have a single 512MB MS Pro Duo. This doesn't allow for much music at 192k+. I have contemplated re-ripping some 100+ CD's but don't want to do that! Having the auto resize to my MS Stick is a great idea! I only did this with a couple of files, but I will try to do a complete collection of music from one artist to see how it turns out. In addition, I really like the ability to choose how I would like to organize the music on the PSP. NullRivier is great, but doesn't allow for the auto resize of files, nor to choose how to store them on the PSP. It is very annoying to set the PSP to "shuffle" play mode, only to have all the music stored in "artist" folders, with sometimes 1 to 3 songs per artist. The PSP will only "shuffle" within a folder. Not really a shuffle if you ask me.
At this point, my experience with this is limited, but I can say, it lacks pre-fetched downloads of podcasts. I must choose to "copy to PSP" those podcast that I want to listen to, and then I must have my PSP connected to my computer while the podcast is DOWNLOADING. I have iPodder/PSPWare all configured to prefetch the "latest" of my podcast subscriptions, drop those podcasts into my "DropBox" folder and when I plug in my PSP. An auto-sync occurrs. I don't have to THINK about the podcast system, it just works. Prefetching is a REQUIREMENT for podcasting. When I have 20 podcast I subscribe to, I really don't have to have to go to each one, and manually select the latestet to download, and worse yet, sit there while I wait for the download. Very poor design.
Overall, I like the interface (a departure from the standard "windows" look and feel. sort of Vista feeling), I really like the music transfer/auto resize feature. I believe this is the strongest feature. The photo manager is second, and would have a much higher rating if it allowed me to sort/organize in the defined folders on my hard drive. I can't scan through 8,000+ photos every time I want to copy a couple of photos. The pocasting feature downright sucks, and I was really hoping to have a single application solution for podcasting. The video feature has not been tested yet, so I will follow up with that tomorrow.
This product has some great potential, and I will probobly purchase it simply for the Music manager. Unfortunatley, now instead of a TWO production solution (iPodder/PSPWare) I am now moving to a THREE product solution (iPodder/PSPWare/Media BOSS). And I thought things were supposed to get easier!
1
Nullriver's PSPware is better.
85
For those looking for an actual comparison, I have Max Media, bought it for the cable. I think that software is terrible. Very slow and unreliable. I have downloaded the trial of Media Boss. Seems much better to me than after an hour or so of use. Feels much more like real software. Overall it seems to do about the same as Max Media, only better. The podcasting is nice and the game saves are cool. Max Media's games saves are for your PS2 (not PSP) and is worthless. I haven't used Nullriver so I can't offer a comparison there.
|
6