I recently discovered that when running J River’s Media Center on Windows Server 2008 (specifically Small Business Server 2008) no WMA files showed up inside the application (in the Drives and Devices view); nor could such files be played, imported or streamed as MP3s to our Roku Soundbridges.

After a couple of hours of work, I discovered that the problem lay in the fact that Windows Server 2008 does not have Windows Media Player installed by default. Instead it must be installed by “enabling the Vista user experience.” Enabling the Vista user experience is fairly straightforward, although it does require a reboot. The instructions can be found here.

Opponents of the healthcare reform legislation in Congress are rightly accused of making arguments based on misinformation.

But there is a good reason why they are having some success in doing so, and why the tactic isn’t totally unfair: the proponents of reform are incredibly slippery with respect to what such reform will entail, making a variety of inconsistent claims or claims that are little more than aspirations.

It is pretty hard for opponents of healthcare reform to debate confident assertions that healthcare reform will be all things to all people: that we’ll have better coverage for more people that costs less. Who could disagree with that? If one makes the (correct) natural counterargument is that it is extremely unlikely that we could achieve that result through a new government initiative, that sounds like defeatism.

That response also prompts an outpouring of assertions and analysis from political advocates of the current healthcare reform proposal that purport to show that this really is possible. The problem is that those claims are pretty slippery and misleading themselves. Keith Hennessey does a great job of describing those claims in a post contains links to 10 Hennessey  posts on the same subject. (Hennessey’s description of why healthcare reform couldn’t be passed through reconciliation (which would not require 60 votes in the Senate) is also excellent and analysis I have not seen elsewhere.)

At this point, opponents could complain about the nature of those assertions and analysis, but that sounds like carping.

It appears that a more successful rhetorical response is to make claims about what is really entailed by healthcare reform that the proponents are not mentioning and in fact even disclaim. That is what is going on at the town meetings we see and it is getting traction because of the inherent unpersuasiveness of the analysis behind the case for current progressive healthcare reform legislation—including the implausibility of various assertions about what the results will be (e.g. if you currently have insurance or Medicare nothing will change). People don’t believe the assertions about what will be in healthcare reform, so many are assuming the worst (with some cause!),

If the case for such changes to healthcare did not have significant problems, the scaremongering at town meetings would not be successful. The fact that it is having success tells us something significant about the case for progressive healthcare reform.

As I mentioned previously, my biggest gripe about my new iPhone so far is that I need to use iTunes to transfer media files to it. As I have mentioned on numerous occasions, my preferred media management software is J River’s Media Center, which (like most non-Apple applications) will not work with the iPhone, thanks to Apple.

I had not used iTunes before and when I installed it, I was shocked to see what little functionality was present in this popular application. I was especially annoyed by its inability to watch a folder automatically for new media files and automatically add them to the iTunes library. Reimporting all the files in a folder to pick up new additions resulted in many duplicate entries in my library for some reason.

However, one advantage of iTunes is that its popularity has resulted in the availability of many third party applications that add functionality. FolderWatch is one such application that adds the ability to add new files from a folder and delete dead links (to files that no longer exist) from the iTunes library. Running FolderWatch starts iTunes, so all I have to do now is run FolderWatch instead of iTunes when I want to sync my iPhone. The free version of Folderwatch has some annoying nag screens, but given how little I use iTunes, that is not really a problem for me.

By the way, I still do most of the management of tracks on my iPhone with J River Media Center. How? I have created a special directory for iTunes and I have set up that directory as a syncable “device” on Media Center with a set of smartlists that describe what files I want on my iPhone. So syncing my iPhone is a two step process: run Media Center and sync the iTunes directory “device”, then run FolderWatch to sync update iTunes, and run iTunes which syncs the iPhone itself.

Although this actually not quite as bad as syncing my Windows Mobile phone (which as a practical matter involved removing the micoSD Card each time), it is still worse that syncing the Blackberry, which Vista recognized as two drives (one for the Blackberry and one for the storage card).

I have given up the Blackberry Bold I started using about three months ago and replaced it with an iPhone 3GS.

Although the Bold was certainly an acceptable device, I was really annoyed by two aspects of media playback that would have eventually caused me to want to replace it even without the advent of the new iPhone:

• Regular crashes of the media player that resulted in a reboot of the entire phone. Those reboots were agonizingly slow and often took 4-5 minutes to complete.
• Poor A2DP Bluetooth reception. If I was not holding the Bold just right I would often have dropouts when listening to audio files playback. This was really annoying and I did not suffer from this problem on my prior HTC Mogul and have not suffered from it more than occasionally using the new iPhone 3GS.

More about my thoughts on the iPhone in the future, but I’ll say this now: the worst part is having to use iTunes. I find it baffling that Palm would go to such great lengths to make the Pre sync with such mediocre media software. The best part is the browser.

I contacted the developer of the TubeCore DLNA Client for Windows Media Center and to their credit in the most recent beta (7) the added support for J River' Media Center. This meant that when I installed beta 7 it no longer locked up Windows Media Center. In installed TubeCore and successfully navigated the UPnP trees from the the J River UPnP server.

Unfortunately for me, I discovered that TubeCore only supports video playback in its current incarnation. However, in an email the developer indicated that they hoped to playback of audio and video files after implementing a few more video features. Given their responsiveness I am hopeful this may actually happen soon!