Tech Blog

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Last year I delcared Songbird, the multi-platform media player and organizer the Best Music Player Ever.

Now, there's a challenger for the title, at least in the Windows / PC arena; MediaMonkey.

The feature set boasted by MediaMonkey is quite extensive covering the basics as well as some rather, um, unique ones:

Reports:
Create Statistics and other Reports of your music collection as Excel, html, or xml files, so that you can show it to others.

If you're **bleep**-retentive about your music, MediaMonkey gives you all the reports you'll need.

Podcast Catcher:
Download audio content using the new integrated Podcatcher. Define custom subscription rules for any audio podcast, and let MediaMonkey take care of downloading and syncing the content.

Media Creation:

Burn Audio CDs using the integrated burner powered by PrimoBurner™. Just select any tracks or playlists and quickly create CD masterpieces using the most reliable CD burning engine around.

Burn MP3 (Data) CD/DVDs to backup your entire music collection or for playback on any MP3-capable CD or DVD players. There’s no need to manually copy and arrange directories — simply choose which Artists, Albums, or Playlists to include, set the disc’s format, and burn!

And two very powerful features for those of us with rather large libraries that we've converted from discs years ago:

Track Management:

Automatically identify tracks that are missing information, whose tags are not synchronized, or that are duplicated elsewhere.

Fix Tags with Automatic Lookup and Tagging of album art and other track information from (competitor).

Lookup CD information on Freedb or via CD-TEXT, and find missing track details through music-related sites such as Allmusic.

If you have a large music collection, MediaMonkey will help you update your tags quickly and accurately.

Tagging tools:

Tag music easily using industry-standard formats. MediaMonkey includes an MP3 Tag editor (an ID3 tag editor supporting ID3v1 & ID3v2), AAC tag editor (for M4A/M4P files), an OGG tag editor (for OGG and FLAC files), a WMA tag editor, an APE2 tag editor (for APE files), and a WAV tag editor. Update and correct mislabeled tracks via drag-and-drop from one artist/genre to another or use the categorization toolbar allows you to quickly set ratings, mood, and other information as you’re listening to music. Automatically and intelligently tag files based on filenames with the Auto-Tagger.

The serious or classical music collector can also assign a broad range of more advanced attributes, such as composer, original year and album, lyrics, etc., and attach multiple attributes per field (e.g. Artist=U2, B.B. King)

These last two features easily replace two or three other utilities that I was using for this. Given the all-in-one approach of this application, if you're just getting started or want to learn only one tool, then MediaMonkey is worth a look. I'm not replacing Songbird just yet, but currently, I bounce between Songbird and MediaMonkey when I'm playing tunes at the desktop.

Both work well, have a full feature set, and are associated with animals. MediaMonkey loses points in that it's not multi-platform.

The basic version (with all the above-mentioned features) can be downloaded for free, and there's a Gold (paid) version available that offers much more.