MediaMonkey Music Manager

Have you ever wanted a program that would be able to play all your entire music library, manage it, automatically synchronize it with your music device, or burn a CD with your favorite tracks? We think that your search might be over. That is because of the new version of MediaMonkey.

Media players went through major evolution when Nullsoft presented Winamp 5. Some major players understood that free software can be as good as commercial and even better. After a while most of the freeware media players started to look like Winamp. Leader of the market had to give us something new, otherwise its main rival, jetAudio, would get potential customers. That’s why Winamp was equipped with media library module, which was a great tool for organizing massive amounts of music and video files. With release of Windows Media Player 11 many people realized that they can have an ultimate tool for playing their favorite music, which can do some other useful tasks.

From the first start the main window looks a bit like in Windows Media Player 9, the same list panel, the same layout. The only thing I was missing was CD cover display, but after couple of seconds I found display mode button that switched the view in my library. Of course something must have gone wrong, cause if you have an album without a cover image MediaMonkey applies the first image in the gallery to any unknown albums which is a shame, because it looks like you would have tons of music from the same artist. In some cases the program assigns also wrong covers to wrong albums. Apart from this issue we have plenty of actions to perform on each selection: you can go to (default) Amazon.com and buy music from selected artist, rate the song/album/artist, etc.

When we look at the interface, the first thing that comes to my mind is that the interface is definitely overloaded. Don't get me wrong, but it will look very good on 1440×1024px resolution, but on my laptop (15" TFT, 1280×800px) everything is crowded. And the constant feeling that they have put too much information on-screen at the same time, it's rather overwhelming. A nice touch though, is the player which resides on the bottom of the screen; glossy, user friendly, has everything you could possibly want from it - cross fader (turned on as a default setting), shuffle, repeat, equalizer, volume knob, etc. On top of that it displays current tracks album info (including mini-cover), mp3 file bit rate, rating, and playlist position.

MediaMonkey let's you do all the tasks like in WMP, like synchronize any supported by system devices (Mp3 Players, iPods, etc.), burn the Audio CD and listen to Internet Radio. But it has one huge advantage over WMP: it can download artist information from FreeDB which is far bigger than Live Music Database, it can automatically rearrange your audio files accordingly to your request, analyze and auto-level volume in all the tracks. When the track changes, program displays a light notification that contains track information and album cover, and after few seconds fades away.

One of the most powerful options in MediaMonkey is displaying plenty of information about our music files, not only artist, title, album and year of recording, but also tempo, mood or quality of the track. All you can say that finally we have a tool for audio maniacs, to catalogue even the smallest detail of our collection, or convert the file formats on-the-fly.

MediaMonkey can also display music stores in its window allowing the users to buy new music without launching additional windows. Of course program has already few big on-line music shops in its database. Apart from shopping for music, new version of Monkey supports podcasts and internet radio without any additional plug-ins.

Very interesting option I found in the menu of MediaMonkey is Party Mode, which basically secures your computer and disables all options of MediaMonkey apart from player, playlist editor and library (read-only mode), allowing people using your computer just to browse your files and play them (they cannot delete anything, as well as they cannot access Windows Taskbar and/or Desktop).

If it comes to configuration, the user has full control over program's behavior. Not only can we setup skinning, proxy settings, or library settings, but also default actions, Party Mode’s password and availability, devices' support. Even WMP can start learning how to present user with some good config panel.

The only thing that wonders me is memory usage: WMP11 needs about 16MB of RAM, while MediaMonkey consumes over 50MB, what for I have no idea. I know that nowadays we can forget about memory problems, but when you have multiple applications open like, e.g. Photoshop or Flash it might eventually become a problem.

Summing it all up, MediaMonkey learns a lot from all the media players (even looks a lot like Microsoft's WMP), but takes it all to the new level, offering advanced functionality and even reporting (if you remember HTML Playlist generation from Winamp, here you got some more options). It has some minor flaws (like the problem with displaying album covers), but overall it's a good position to look at, especially if you don't have Windows Vista and would like to have the functionality of WMP11 without all the fuss with installation involved.