MediaMonkey Music Player

Being an iTunes hater can be hard. Okay, perhaps ‘hater’ is too strong a word. But I refuse, under any circumstances, to use iTunes for my audio media management. I don’t like the way iTunes is all up in one’s business — it’s too involved with my music for my tastes. I want a robust audio player that has a lot of functionality but doesn’t try to go autonomous on me. I also want something that will help me manage my library better and, if possible, tag/re-tag and rename individual tracks for better organization.

For a long time, I stuck with MusicMatch Jukebox, a player that sometimes came free with new computers and to which I became very attached. I liked the way MMJB displayed and organized my library, plus it had a ton of options. The best one was a feature which would help me identify the ID3 information of a track by looking it up on a CD database and tag it accordingly. This tool also conveniently renamed tracks, individually or in swaths, based on the tag information. I was in the process of cleaning up my moderately-sized MP3 collection when MMJB completely died on me one day.

Under normal circumstances this would not be a problem — just re-install or download again. But no. You see, many years ago Yahoo purchased MusicMatch (which was also a content site with the ability to stream stations of music by similar artist or genre, similar to Last.fm today) and that eventually became Yahoo!Music. Along with the site came the player, and soon I began to get random pop-ups informing me that MMJB was now Yahoo Jukebox (or something, I admit I was too angry to pay close attention) and that support for my version of the program would end soon. I didn’t want the new, intrusive and horrendous Yahoo version of the player, so I stuck with mine. Eventually support ended and the popups mostly went away.

But then the program itself began to break down.

It wouldn’t start properly every time — sometimes looking for updates to software on servers that probably didn’t exist anymore. Shutting down always required intervention from the Task Manager. One day I stopped having the ability to burn CDs.

I finally had to give the program up.

In my search for a replacement I discovered something about music and media players: a lot of them suck!

Before MMJB I used RealPlayer, but that had pretty limited functionality, horrible library management, and no tag tools to speak of. Windows Media Player wasn’t much better, but it was okay in a pinch. WinAmp failed to impress me, as did Songbird (that app is really not ready for prime time). I despaired of finding a comparable program and started to investigate re-downloading an old version of MMJB, even if I couldn’t activate the Pro mode.

Then someone suggested MediaMonkey. That person saved my musical life.

MediaMonkey is an audio player by Ventis Media. It isn’t designed for just one device, like iTunes, and offers users many tools to help organize and manage large music libraries for free. It can play a plethora of file types, including ogg. The Gold version offers even more tools.

The default look of MediaMonkey is very reminiscent of MMJB — the main area is split into three columns. From left to right, an explorer column with access to tracks, playlists, and optical drives; a detailed track listing window with configurable headers; a Now Playing column.

Along the top is the usual suite of buttons with easy access to typical functionalities. The bottom of the screen is dedicated to the seek bar, controls, track info, and equalizer button.

On a netbook this can all seem crowded, but the View menu allows me to decide which of these or a few other options are displayed.

I particularly appreciate the Explorer column because it allows me to find music in several ways: by artist, album, title, genre, year, rating, playlist, location, On the Computer, classification (tempo, mood, etc), even the web. It will also list podcasts in a separate dropdown so it’s easier to manage those separate from regular MP3s. As simple as this seems, there were very few programs I tried that gave me all this in a satisfactory manner.

I haven’t had a chance to try out all of the functions — I’m going to try burning a CD soon and, when I’m feeling adventurous, syncing my MP3 player. I’ve been spending time working with the Tag utilities.

MediaMonkey gives you an option to AutoTag from information found on the web, AutoTag from the file name, AutoOrganize files and, under Advanced, sync tags and clean them up according to ID3v1 or v2 standards.

Though the app is far more robust than most others I’ve tried, it still doesn’t quite measure up to MMJB’s tagging abilities. AutoTagging from the web searches Amazon.com for album information and attempts to apply it to your track or selection of tracks. But Amazon’s database doesn’t have enough discrete fields or data to be 100% effective in this regard. Also, the search engine is a bit hinkey, so you have to fiddle a bit. Basically, you need to know exactly what album you’re looking for. MMJB’s was a bit more intuitive and only needed a little information to find the correct data.

AutoTag from File Name is also not as useful as it could be, as the engine counts plain spaces as delimiters. So, if my file name is:

John Barrowman – Time After Time – 06.mp3

And I try to tell it to tag the file:

– –

The engine will get confused by the space and list the artist as John and the track name as “Barrowman – Time After Time – 06” or something like that. MMJB was a bit smarter than this.

Luckily, MediaMonkey is one of those programs with an active community and involved developers. It’s not exactly open source, but the development of the software is influenced by the users. This may mean more involvement than most casual users want, but for someone who is very particular about what she wants, I’m willing to put in the effort.

Another thing I plan to do soon is play around with the library maintenance function to see if it’s useful.

If you have a large music collection and hate iTunes, then MediaMonkey is your best bet. It’s probably your best bet even if you like iTunes. You’d probably enjoy it even if you want a simple, easy music player — MediaMonkey doesn’t try to do more for you than you ask of it. Though, after using it for a while, you’ll probably get curious about some of the more complex functionality and give some of it a try.

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