Hey all, apologies if this post is in the wrong section/of the wrong topic - but I figured after much unsuccessful googling this would be a sensible place to come.
Heres my situation; I'm a student at a University with a respectable spec laptop (nothing 'super', 1.6Ghz dual core + 1028DDR2 ram etc, XP pro and a fairly nice bose speaker system). Unfortunately with the amount of money I have at the moment I struggle to afford general student life (drink), hence big plasma TVs and mega sound setups are way out of my grasp. I have a fairly large music collection of 8000+ songs, all with correct tags and artwork (although a few are messed up because of Itunes 7+, I can fix these)
My question is; am I looking in the right place? I'm looking for a program similar to Windows Media Center and Apples 'Front row' applications. The type of program which will essentially bring up a nice GUI on my laptop which I can play music with using the remote which came with the laptop (a HP Infra-red thing). DVDs would be a nice bonus, but arn't essential by any means as the laptop has no problem in playing them currently.
I have just installed MediaPortal and found it a fantastic program, although slightly complex for what I am trying to accomplish. I do not need to control any TVs/Xboxs/other devices and only require it essentially to turn my laptop into a large Ipod, controllable from a few metres away (using itunes like this requires eagle eye sight and the patience of a saint to navigate through hundreds of albums/songs and is simply impractical). I consider myself fairly competant with computers, but would dislike to go through hundreds of menus to find out that I was barking up the wrong tree the whole time =/. From what I have seen MediaPortal clogs up the PC alot, is there any way to slim it down if the music component was all I needed? Is there any way to replace the MediaPortal player integrated into the GUI with Itunes (hence all my artwork/tags are shared between the two programs, and Ipod can be updated the same etc).
Hopefully this post explains everything =) thanks in advance for the replies
Heres my situation; I'm a student at a University with a respectable spec laptop (nothing 'super', 1.6Ghz dual core + 1028DDR2 ram etc, XP pro and a fairly nice bose speaker system). Unfortunately with the amount of money I have at the moment I struggle to afford general student life (drink), hence big plasma TVs and mega sound setups are way out of my grasp. I have a fairly large music collection of 8000+ songs, all with correct tags and artwork (although a few are messed up because of Itunes 7+, I can fix these)
My question is; am I looking in the right place? I'm looking for a program similar to Windows Media Center and Apples 'Front row' applications. The type of program which will essentially bring up a nice GUI on my laptop which I can play music with using the remote which came with the laptop (a HP Infra-red thing). DVDs would be a nice bonus, but arn't essential by any means as the laptop has no problem in playing them currently.
I have just installed MediaPortal and found it a fantastic program, although slightly complex for what I am trying to accomplish. I do not need to control any TVs/Xboxs/other devices and only require it essentially to turn my laptop into a large Ipod, controllable from a few metres away (using itunes like this requires eagle eye sight and the patience of a saint to navigate through hundreds of albums/songs and is simply impractical). I consider myself fairly competant with computers, but would dislike to go through hundreds of menus to find out that I was barking up the wrong tree the whole time =/. From what I have seen MediaPortal clogs up the PC alot, is there any way to slim it down if the music component was all I needed? Is there any way to replace the MediaPortal player integrated into the GUI with Itunes (hence all my artwork/tags are shared between the two programs, and Ipod can be updated the same etc).
Hopefully this post explains everything =) thanks in advance for the replies