The JBSim choice was pretty easy, once I found it. I was looking for a while and had tried quite a few others. I wanted something that felt like a real jukebox and handled full albums as that's what a real modern CD juke does these days. I thought I had found what I was looking for. I liked most of the features and it ran well with the demo load of albums but once I registered it and started loading it with hundreds of albums, I found some stability problems. Add to that the lack of response to messages posted to their forum regarding these types of issues and the lack of responses to my email inquiries left a bad taste in my mouth. Not looking to gossip or bad mouth anyone's product so I'll leave it nameless but it disappointed me, so I had to start looking again.
I have no such qualms, because I had the same issues with "support" you did over there at VMJ. Some of my questions and issues actually WERE responded to, but when I ask a question, I don't expect the response to be this rude, and I quote, "upgrade your computer to something modern." That response was essentially telling me that his software would end up costing me upwards of $100

In trying to test the demo on my b-i-l's XP machine, it crashed three times before it worked well enough to test, and the support issues he was having with XP were helping show me he wasn't the most capable of fixing the problems he WAS willing to deal with!
My request there was I wanted to test out the ease of creating a skin. I'm still waiting for a reply to that first and second e-mail, the post on the forum, and the suggestion as a future feature to be done.
All in all, I left VMJ sitting with the same bad taste in my mouth you experienced. For someone who's so into being "commercial", he comes off QUITE unprofessional, and I'm someone who DOESN'T mind "gossipping" the truth, as it'll help quite a few people know the SERIOIUS downsides of going the VMJ route.
I had been using Chris' software, since I generally liked that and Chris NEVER seemed to be as flummoxed with problems (and even if he was, he never let on

) and would probably still use it for a singles-based jukebox. It's PERFECT for that, and I keep checking here and there to see what he's added, since I like his "style" and programming skilz.
Thank you again for alerting us to JBSim. Kudos for the awesome tip!
Of course the real test is putting it a jukebox and letting people who have never used it before work with it and see if any problems crop up.
My wife was able to fire it up and choose exactly what she wanted with absolutely no help from me. You may have some determined fools as friends, so I don't wanna tell you it's foolproof, but the wife test has yet to fail me when trying to gauge stuff like that.