JRiver Media Center is Faster

JRiver is the fastest media software available. It is an order of magnitude faster than iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Its database offers world-class performance. Users routinely depend on the program to manage libraries of 500,000 files or more.

iTunes vs JRiver Media Center

The benchmarks below compare the performance of Media Center against iTunes. The test library is 100,000 MP3 files stored on a local drive. The benchmark machine is a quad-core i7 2600k running Windows 7 x64. The versions of the programs tested were Media Center 17 and iTunes 10.5.

Import 100,000 files into an empty library

iTunes: 161 minutes, 29 seconds (no progress, program frozen while working, loss of power causes data loss of all previous work, 330 MB of memory usage)
Media Center: 14 minutes, 3 seconds (nice progress, program fully usable while working, loss of power causes minimal data loss, 245 MB of memory usage)
Media Center is 11.5x faster

Load program to audio view with genre, artist, album panes (after cold boot)

iTunes: 3.8 seconds (285 MB of memory usage)
Media Center: 0.9 seconds (60 MB of memory usage)
Media Center is 4.2x faster

Select all files and drag them to a new playlist

iTunes: 368 seconds
Media Center: 2.1 seconds
Media Center is 175x faster

Tag 1000 files with a comment

iTunes: 52.9 seconds (program blocked while working)
Media Center: 11.7 seconds (tagging works in background, so program is fully usable)
Media Center is 4.5x faster

Windows Media Player vs JRiver Media Center

The benchmarks below compare the performance of Media Center against Windows Media Player (WMP). The test library is 100,000 MP3 files stored on a local drive. The benchmark machine is a quad-core i7 2600k running Windows 7 x64. The versions of the programs tested were Media Center 17 and WMP 12.

Import 100,000 files into an empty library

WMP: 2 days, 6 hours
Media Center: 14 minutes, 3 seconds
Media Center is 231x faster

Load program to audio view

WMP: 39.4 seconds (view appears in a few seconds but is not filled for much longer)
Media Center: 0.9 seconds
Media Center is 43.8x faster

Select all files and drag them to a new playlist

WMP: playlists do not support over 10,000 files
Media Center: 2.1 seconds
Media Center works, WMP does not work

Tag 1000 files with a comment

WMP: does not support the comment field (or any ID3v2.4 tagging)
Media Center: 11.7 seconds (tagging works in background, so program is fully usable)
Media Center works, WMP does not work