Meedio Essentials 1.15.22.0, Part 2 - A Sleek and Clean HTPC Interface

Name: Meedio Essentials 1.15.22.0, Part 2 - A Sleek and Clean HTPC Interface
Item: Meedio Essentials 1.15.22.0, Part 2 - A Sleek and Clean HTPC Interface
Author: Andrew Ku

by Andrew Ku on September 11, 2004 11:25 AM EST

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Meedio Essentials - Audio Ripping and Streaming Radio (cont.)

When you pop in a CD, it is ripped automatically by the CD ripping module. After it has been ripped, every subsequent insert of that CD will autoplay it in the Gotcha Covered CD player. The difference between this player and that of the built-in player of ME is that the CD player for GC is more like the Now Playing screen.

Click to enlarge.

It use to be that GC pulled the cover art automatically from the walmart.com website, but there seem to be a change in the walmart.com infrastructure, which caused automatic downloading to not function.

On GC's website in the news section, they write:

Wal-Mart website changed. 2004.07.29

Due to a change in the WAL-MART.COM website, the cover art search will hang if it is searched. Please disable wal-mart.com from the searching website until I get this fixed. A fix will be out ASAP!

It did work in the past apparently, but for now, you won't get anything. However, the CD player does feature more control over settings like EQ settings, which are under the space where the CD cover art would be. The other buttons are straightforward, and the "Rip CD" option simply switches to GC's CD ripping module. If you are looking to use this as a replacement for ME's interface, we would recommend holding off for a bit. Meedio is suppose to have their own plug-in that does cover art and other various functions once licensing is worked out. GC's options are nice, but they don't necessarily have a better UI, since there are no increase or decrease progressive bar icons that indicate the level of volume, like in MCE.

The other feature of GC is the internet radio player. Is it is a fairly simple layout, similar to the CD player, but ported over the internet radio use.

Click to enlarge.

As far as we understand it, there is rarely ever cover art for radio streamed (at least the station that we tried), so the "no cover art found" image is probably going to be seen in most cases. All of the other functions within the Net Radio Player are intuitive, minus the "Record Station" function, which we assume to be a way to record streaming audio. However, it didn't perform any specific function for us.