MCE Tunes Completely Bridges iTunes Gap With Media Center
Last week I wrote about a new plug-in for Media
Center called MCE Tunes that allows you to sync iTunes with Media Center
and even play purchased music from the iTMS from within the Media
Center UI.
They do offer a free trial, but it doesn’t
support protected content from the iTMS so I thought I would give everyone out
there a mini-review of the protect playing back protected content before you
spend money on the product just for a letdown.
Well, I’m here to say this product is no letdown. I’ve been playing around with a full version
of the plug-in for the past week and it works great! Now, I should note that I am not an iTunes
user, nor do I generally purchase music from the iTMS. However, I do have a very small amount of
content which I used to test with.
Setup is very simple using MCE Tunes. You can import your entire iTunes Library, only
selected tracks with a certain star rating (say three stars or better), or you
can select a specific playlist to import.
MCE Tunes will share your settings on a daily basis so that your
selected content is always available in Media Center
(think Watched Folders).
After you import your select content that is just about
it. Open
Media Center
(or Windows Media Player) and you will see your music listed in Media Center. Tags are transferred over, so you can still
browse by Artist, Album, Song, etc. Currently
Album Art isn’t transfer, but I’m told that they are working on trying to get
that working.
Playback occurs just as mp3 and wma files are in Media Center. Just select it with your remote and you will
not even be aware that it’s being controlled via a third party plug-in.
This application really does “just works”, and if you are a
iTunes user I would give it a try. The free trial supports playback of
unprotected files (m4a) and the paid versions adds support for protected music
from the iTMS (m4p).
Give it a shot, I don’t
think you will be disappointed.
