MediaMonkey

After my post yesterday about MusicIP Mixer I was reading something on a forum about MusicIP and in the signture of someones post it mentioned something about MediaMonkey. So I clicked on the link and ended up finding a program that is billed as a Free MP3 Jukebox Player, Music Library Organizer. I thought not another, I've tried loads of these from major programs like iTunes and Windows Media Player to smaller programs that I can't even remember the names of. All have been slow or had other problems and faults.

Yet for some reason I read on and could see that MediaMonkey had a lot of features and it mentioned about working with large libraries of files. Most programs seriously start to slow down once you have a couple of thousand files and just get slower and slower the more files you have. So when it says, designed to work with libraries of 50,000+ files it caught my eye.

I installed MediaMonkey last night and I have been impressed with how well it imports information from other programs and devices and how quick it works. It is highly customizable and there are quite a few plugins, scripts and skins for it. A huge bonus is it actually works with most Winamp plugins so there are tons of plugins out there that will work.

I intended to try it to organise my music and play the songs with Winamp but I have been playing music all day with the built in player and other than it sometimes taking a few seconds to start to play WMA files it has worked perfectly.

I have installed a couple of plugins, MonkeyRok which displays loads of extra information about the song that is playing and AutoRate which automatically rates the songs you play by number of times played and if you skip over a song it get a low rating. I have yet to try and sync it with my iPod or Zen but hopefully it will work as well as it says it does.

So I now have an arsenal of excellent programs and websites that I use for music:

Winamp - The Best MP3 Player
Tag&Rename - Rename and Tag your audio files
dBpowerAMP - Convert between audio formats
Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition) - Excellent Sound Editor
MusicIP Mixer - Help dicover your music library
MediaMonkey - Manage your audio files
Album Cover Art Downloader - Download and tag your audio files with cover art
AllMusic - Excellent music site with reviews and details of albums and artists
Napster - As much music as you can download, but renting it
AllOfMP3 - Buy albums in just about any format or bitrate (haven't used for a while)