Ever since the first PC sound card, computers have grown more and more media-centric. We use our PCs to mix music, edit home movies, burn CDs and DVDs, and tweak our photos. It then stands to reason that some of the most popular applications are media players. Winamp and iTunes are very popular, but there are hundreds of alternatives. So, for this week’s Freeware Frenzy, I’ll be examining one of those other programs: Media Monkey v2.5.4.978
Installation has nothing unusual; you choose to create a desktop or quick launch icon, whether or not to install skins (checked by default) and which files types to associate with MM. MediaMonkey supports the follow file types: OGG, MP3, WMA, MPC,CDA, M3U, PLS, APE, FLAC and more. You might wonder if .APE is a clever file type created by MediaMonkey’s developers, and indeed it is a lossless compression format from Monkey Studios.
When you first open MM, a little popup will remind you about the features of MM Gold. This popup will not appear each time you open the program. It also mentions the drive scan that it needs to search for media on your computer. You can setup the drives to check in a subsequent window, as well as file types to include or exclude. I keep all of my music collection in Windows’ own “My Music” folder for convenience, so I checked it on the file tree and hit OK. I have around 1500 tracks totaling over 6GB, but MM only needed a couple minutes to import them all. MM will read all of the music’s internal ID3 tags for title, artist, genre, etc. When my library scan was complete, another window popped up about retrieving any missing information from the other media players on my machine; iTunes, Windows Media Player and Winamp. I checked “Do Not Ask Me Again” but clicked OK. MM may as well have all the information it can, even if it looks to other programs for help. I did find it impressive that MM had that awareness, something that most applications, media related or not, do not possess. It took just a moment to import the data from those three other programs, if there was any at all.
MM organizes music with a folder tree along the left edge of the program. Simply click on the organization method you prefer, such as by artist, title, album, year or genre. I prefer to organize primarily by artist, then album. Unfortunately MM prefers artist, then title, meaning that multiple albums from one artist will be mixed together. This is admittedly a minor complaint, and may not even apply to other people. Your library appears then in the large window next to the folders. To round out the main screen, the actual player sits along the bottom with a Now Playing list and Album Art. The album art comes from the folder where your music is located, and not from MM and a database. So if you do not already have the art, this area will be blank. You can of course, close it. Let’s explore the folder tree a bit further, because it contains more then just your library.
Files to Edit lets you quickly see any music that needs a bit of attention. Classified in a number of ways; unknown fields (title, artist, album, etc) or duplicates, you can scan through and fix items with missing information quickly, instead of checking thousands of files manually. For anyone who demands perfection, this is a well appreciated addition to MM. Next on the list is another interesting feature called Virtual CD. This lets you avoid any duplication from ripping selected tracks and an entire CD to your computer. Instead, you can configure a Virtual CD, so that only the tracks not already on the computer are ripped. Then you have just one copy of each track, so you can both listen to a CD in its entirety or mix and move tracks however you would like. Unfortunately, Virtual CDs are not available in the Standard version, but I felt it was an interesting feature to mention. Speaking of feature availability, upgrading to “Gold” will enable this, as well as automatic library updates, a sleep timer, full speed burning and on-the-fly conversion for portable devices. But the Standard edition has plenty of features to keep it a viable option for everyone.
If you should grow bored with your local music collection, MediaMonkey has you covered. Under the Net Radio option, the library window changes to a browser frame to pull up either the Shoutcast or Icecast radio links. Then, should you hear a tune that you would like to own, you can click on “Web”. Then you can surf to Amazon, CDUniverse, Allmusic.com and others to browse for and purchase music, movies, posters and anything else on those websites.
MM includes numerous other extras that I will list here; tag editing, file conversion, (You’ll need to manually download the LAME MP3 encoder, just Google it. Without it, MM will disable MP3 encoding after a certain time.) synchronization with portable devices, including iPods, PlaysForSure devices, iRiver products and many others via a Generic Device driver. My out-of-production Dell player sync’d easily. You can also create play lists, download skins and visualizations for Party (full screen) mode and rip CDs (slowly).
Overall I was impressed with MediaMonkey. The feature list is plentiful for a free media player. As a long time Winamp user, I can’t say that I’m ready for a switch, but MM will come in handy for easy organization, synchronizing with MP3 players and audio format conversion. I’ll be keeping it around for awhile. Check it out on: http://www.mediamonkey.com/
