[mcgsxr]

Back with more questions from a good friend.

He has a mixed bag of around 1.5TB of MP3 and FLAC.  He is willing to reformat the FLAC to ALAC, and live with the resolution challenges of the MP3 collection.

He is considering buying a current Mac Mini to act as his media player.

His decision is largely driven by his love of the iTunes Genius application.

Are there alternative players that have this capability?

He likes the idea of using the Airport Express to connect different systems to the iTunes "server" to be in the basement.  He has 3 audio systems total, including the outdoor setup.

My only Mac Mini experience is with one of the older PowerPC versions, so I am unclear on all his options.  I still favor running LMS on a netbook myself.

Thanks guys!

[lokie]

Are there alternative players that have this capability?

Alternative players that "do genious" like stuff in Itunes? Not sure but doubt it.

Or players that "do genious" like stuff on PC and other than Itunes?

[mcgsxr]

Any suggestions welcome.

He has an older PC lying around that we could use to run an alternate music s/w if there is something out there that can act like Genius.

[srb]

JRiver Media Center has the Play Doctor function which is somewhat similar to iTunes Genius.  You enter an Artist, Genre or Song and it builds a playlist based on options of Some Variety, More Variety or Lots of Variety as well as any inclusion / exclusion rules you have set.  Generated playlists can be saved with single click Radio buttons.

JRiver does not have Apple Airplay, although third party Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil app can be used in conjunction with it.  Although I have Airfoil and do use it to stream browser content to Airport Express, I have opted to use both JRiver and iTunes  -  JRiver as the main player and iTunes for Airplay streaming to three Airport Express locations controlled with iTunes Remote app on the iPhone, iPod or iPad as well as syncing to those devices.

Files are imported into iTunes and JRiver is set to simply monitor the iTunes library folder location.  Because iTunes doesn't play FLAC files, any FLACs that I had were converted into ALAC or AIFF.

Steve

[mcgsxr]

Thanks guys.

I suspect the easiest thing for him to do is to just pony up for a Mac Mini and use what he knows - iTunes and Genius. 

I will help him turn his FLAC into ALAC and get it all up and running, and show him how to download whatever app he needs for his Android phone to control his iTunes environment.

Appreciate it!