Dream come true - audiophile user on appleTV says THANK YOU

[lykose]

hey dear MrMC devs,

I know your app can do more as music, but my interest is „just“ in a solution on appleTV playing and deal with my audio-files flawlessly.

Now that I finally found MrMC it absolutely blew my mind and really is a dream come true, BIG thanx!

Allow me a bit of explanation to go a bit into the past and tell the whole story. Just jump to the bottom if you are not interested into it and read my THANKS, because I think it’s also important for devs to read how thankful users are, and I am.

Let me shortly explain why and where I come from:
Over roundabout 25 years I build my lossless audio library, in the beginning handling all as ALAC files in good old iTunes, connecting my Mac/computer to the TV for „couch-control“.
iTunes was perfect for me: gapless playback, crossfade playback, intelligent playlists, partymode alias iTunesDJ, good ID-tags, ratings, nice app-interface, (iVolumesGain via external app).
So I could for example create intelligent playlist like: play genre „downtempo“, just ratings 5 and 4 star, duration per track not longer as 5 minutes, shuffle playback with crossfade. Nice.
Biggest „disadvantage“ here: you need always have a computer running, and interface, as much as I loved it, was not that „couch friendly“.

well, apple than blew up iTunes imho into a wrong direction and finally killed it with the in these days upcoming music-streaming hype.
So i jumped on that streaming thing, apple music, spotify, tidal, … just to find out till today: nearly just 50% of my music is there. Because of licensing things much „rare“, „bootleg“ or „uncommon“ music is not on streaming services.

Years went by and I moved my 500gb lossless-music-archive from iTunes (Mac) to pc foobar2000. To not loose my (over many years and with love created) ratings, I copied them over to a common ID-tag (comments) which is supported by mostly any music-app.
With foobar2000 intelligent playlist an easy task than to use ID-tag „comment“ to work as „ratings“. So foobar2000 is great, again: all things I mentioned for iTunes (except interface), plus integrated replay-gain scanner/reader for „track“ and „album“, awesome.
Disadvantage: (again) you need your pc always running when in „couch mode“.

Than, not long ago, I got an appleTV. Love it, perfect for my „couch needs“ when it comes to „watching TV“ and the option to use other apps on it. No fan-noise and low on electricity usage (both factors are very important for me when it comes to „couch mode“) and a great remote control.
An „additional“ „electricity using“ device like a NAS or raspberry was never an option for me. In a perfect world I wanted „just“ my appleTV handle everything, and of course also my lossless audio.
So I searched the internet for solutions, which was very disappointing when you search „just“ for an advanced audio player for tvOS; there are non. Luckily I quickly realised that some „media center“ apps could be my hope. So I looked into them, plex, infuse, 8 player, vlc, …. Kodi and finally found „the little brother“ MrMC for tvOS.
While many of the named apps are great, the disadvantage for me is that you need often a special server for it running on a NAS for example or just like in case of kodi, not officially in app-store (you really want me to re-install the app in a complicate way once per week? Really?)

(And finally here comes my main point and the big THANKS to the MrMC devs):

MrMC is just perfect for me and blew my mind:
„Couch friendly“ and great interface (skin AMBER), ALAC lossless audio support, gapless playback, intelligent playlists (so I can read all my ratings from ID-tag „comments“ and create partymode like „genre is r&b and funk, 5, 4 and 3 star rating only, track-duration max. 5 mins, crossfade, replay-gain track-mode, …“. Awesome! (Nice option btw to crossfade single tracks while playing gapless albums without crossfade)
I do not need the massive „extensions“ support of kodi to grab infos and pictures from the internet for example. My ID-tags are my „key“ and I have them all nice, clean and structured, with album-art inside the files.

But the „nicest“ solution is, that I do not need an additional device like a NAS beside my appleTV, which would suck the whole time electricity (and maybe do some fan-noise).
While my internet-router is runnig 24/7 anyway, I plugged a big usb-stick into my Fritz.Box (up to 4tb passive powered storage is possible imho) with all my music files, and connect MrMC via smb with the Fritz.box.

From what I see here in the forum, MrMC is not that „regular“ in development anymore, which is of course very sad thing. But on the other hand it seems not fully unsupported (I saw an „black screen bug fix“ in November 2022). I hope that this support will resume in the future and MrMC will not die or get out of the apple app-store.

Allow me here one little request which can maybe be implemented into MrMC in any upcoming update:
- support of ID-tag „composer“ in smart list selection (not just for classical music very handy)
Or, if possible and even better, could you give the user the option to use „self-defined“ tags in smart lists? So for example, user do not pick I’d-tag from a list to work with, but write what ever wants and use smart list function with those. So here as example, I could write myself „composer“ or whatever I’d-Tag-Name my files have and apply rules for it.

Devs, thank you very much for MrMC. You make one audiophile user here very happy with your great app for tvOS.
I hope I can inspire some future folks searching for an similar solution.

[DocEagle]

As for your wishes concerning an upcoming update - look here

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