JRiver Media Center

I’m not affiliated with JRiver in any way, however I must dedicate a few lines to this wonderful software. While it may not be all that to all people, it has formed the base of my system and turned out to be able to house a lot of different and experimental setups. While the DSP part of this program already is quite elaborate, one can build upon it by adding VST plugins at will. It has a reasonably simple GUI for use as media player function. I tested some other programs for similar usage but this was the only one that could entertain all the different ideas I could come up with.

For starters it has two EQ banks that can house endless numbers of PEQ’s, shelves, crossovers and other functions. It also has a build in convolver for FIR filters, a graphical EQ and countless other features.

I use the standard environment of JRiver and expanded upon it with a couple plugins. Together this offers a sea of possibilities to use for processing.

Processing itself often gets a bad name. I often read that people are disappointed after using EQ or FIR filters. “The sound became dull” is an often heard or read phenomenon. That’s not the fault of DSP though. Basically you will get what you ask for. So it comes down to knowing what you want the DSP to do. ‘Learning what it is you want’ before blaming the tools that ‘can get it’ for you.

JRiver plus a multi channel sound card can give you almost endless options to play with, whether you’re interested in Stereo, Multi channel Home Theatre or actively controlled speaker management. It can re-sync the audio/video after use of FIR filters which introduce latency. For me, I could not have done what I did without this nifty program. It has become the foundation that I build upon.