I looked in the FAQ and didn't see this, so please don't hate on me if you consider this to belong in the FAQ.

Which client/server combo do people like best?

My own current answer is that JReceiver + tRio is better in many regards than the default ARM + Rio client combination.

The default setup had trouble on both client and server sides with largish track counts; it couldn't play albums in original track order w/o cumbersome setup of per-album specialized playlists; the client tended to reboot when you might least expect it; the server often wouldn't run right (on windoze) after making changes (importing new tracks) without rebooting the entire Win2K machine; ...and so on... About the only thing it did right for me was to randomly play across a large selection of tracks. To do this, however, I had to segment my ~5000 track collection into four parts by building separate playlists for each quarter of the collection. Then, I could random play but only within one quarter of the collection at a time. That sucked, as did my attempts to play albums in track order, and instead have the tracks come up alphabetically. Pink Floyd's The Wall doesn't sound as good in any order other than the original.

The JRec+tRio combo can easily play albums in original track order, has pretty much no issues with high track counts or long playlists, is reasonably customizable, etc. The use of a RealDatabase(tm) in the form of MySQL is a nice touch, if perhaps a bit of overkill. At least you can be reasonably sure the track info isn't gonna disappear inside some half-baked proprietary monolithic application (what is A.R.M. using by the way?). The only thing I'm missing so far is bass/treble control at the client (especially useful when driving unpowered speakers with the local amp), but I suspect this may be coming. Heck, I could even [theoretically] get off my ass and dig into the source to see about adding this: the entire combo is of course open sourced.

I know there are at least two more clients for the Rio hardware end (RRR, Reza's client?), and at least one other server (Mock's Perl server). While I didn't initially like the install requirements for JReceiver (MySQL, Java V.M., Jetty, JRec itself, tRio driver for MySQL, tRio client for Rio HW, etc.), everything installed pretty smoothly. The resulting combination is much better than before. (Note that I'm running all the server stuff on windoze at the moment, so I still use A.R.M. to dish out each Rio client's IP, and also to serve up the network-mounted boot image. After that, everything is handled by the JReceiver package. I plan to move the server stuff to Linux when I find space over there for the media files themselves.)

So what do you folks think about available choices of server and client?

Server: I like JReceiver so far. Are there other server alternatives besides Jeff Mock's Perl-based server? I have the sense that the Mock stuff is less capable than JReceiver, so I'm not terribly interested in going there.

Client: How do the other clients fare in comparison to tRio? I'm interested in others that work with JReceiver and other servers (if other servers exist). In other words, I'm not necessarily limiting myself to JReceiver on the server side.