Editor's Review:
by FrostApps team on 2010-07-28 13:31:18
Version reviewed: MediaMonkey 3.2.1.1297
Version reviewed: MediaMonkey 3.2.1.1297
The fact is that most of us listen to music very often, and it has become an indispensable part of our lives. There are of course a lot of players put there to help us maximize our enjoyment in this fine art. Most of them are in a lot of ways similar to one another concerning looks and options, but not MediaMonkey. This player can be best described as advanced iTunes. It is not just a music player, MediaMonkey allows you also to organize and edit tags, rip Audio CDs, burn audio files on CDs or DVDs, tag Album Art and other metadata. It can also synchronize music with attached portable device such as iPhones, iPods, and almost any MP3 phone or Audio Devices.
At first glimpse of the application you can see that it is really professionally made. During installation process you will be asked whether you wish it to use current windows theme or its own skins, which can of course be changed at any time through Options menu. While testing, we first let it use current windows theme, which by no surprise looks pretty default save for some icons. When we used applications own skin, we noticed that it quite resembles iTunes skin. This is not really surprising either as we believe the application to be created as a sort of replacement for iTunes. Of course there other skins to set up and download.
Main window can be a bit overwhelming when you fire up MediaMonkey for the first time, especially if you haven't used iTunes before. Tons of options and information displayed in relatively small space (of course this depends of your monitor size), but still it is not overcrowded. Everything has its place and is composed perfectly once you get accustomed to it. Most of the main window is reserved for file browser. On the left part there is tree view of your hard disks and currently connected USB drives. Apart from that the tree view contains Web part which has links to internet music stores, Net Radio which contains shoutcasts directory, podcast subscriptions, playlists and library. Podcast subscriptions and playlists need no explaining since they speak for themselves. Now library has exactly the same function as with iTunes, you are supposed to let it scan your hard disks and add all your songs to it. We are not really a big fans of this practice but we can see how this is needed. In the center of the main window there is a list of files in the current folder you are in, but only of those of supported format. This is really convenient, so users don't mess anything up trying to make program play .doc or .exe file, and this prevents misclicking on wrong file as well. Of course if you have selected a playlist file this part of program shows you entire playlist and lets you play the desired song.
Right part of the main window holds Now Playing list, which as its name says shows you playlist and track that you are currently playing. This is present so you can browse through other places and add files to your current playlist with ease. Lower part is reserved for player itself, with pretty basic buttons like play/pause, next song, previous song etc. Of course there is seek bar and song information panel, with a few buttons of its own like show/hide playlist, turn shuffle and/or continuous playback on/off and inevitable equalizer. Equalizer is pretty basic with options to twist sound reproduction a bit and save/load presets. Nothing new and revolutionary here.
Top of the window is, as always, reserved for menu and options. If you like tweaking your programs, you are in for a treat here. Besides three different views of file browser there are a lot of options for changing the way MediaMonkey looks and behaves, but we will take a look at that shortly. Lets first cover toolbar with icons. First one is for ripping audio cd's to hard drive. It can rip CD's in mp3,WMA,OGG,WAV or FLAC format. Of course there are settings for every format to help you get desired quality/file size ratio. Default destination for ripped songs is "C:\My Music", but that can be easily changed with just a few clicks. MediaMonkey even lets you chose the format in which the ripped files will be named, ranging from "artist - song" through "genre\year\artist - title" to "album\track, artist - title". As you can see very thorough ripping process. For a 20 track audio CD it took about 3-4 minutes to rip which is fairly good.
Next icon represents CD/DVD burning tool. We must say that we are not impressed with this one, but mainly for the reason we noted a bit earlier in this text. We don't practice letting programs create library from our hard disks, and this burner can only burn files from programs library. We would strongly suggest developers to add a simple file browser to this burner and not limit it to burning only music which would make him a lot more useful, even maybe let it replace your default CD/DVD burning software (hey why installing two programs when you can do everything in one). Apart from that MediaMonkey's burner is pretty good.
Next icon is "send to portable device" option which changes its look depending on what portable device is currently connected. We have tested this option with iPod Touch 2G and 3.1.2 firmware. If you hate iTunes process of synchronization as much as we do, you will love this option. It lets you send to your iPod or iPhone single or multiple audio files without having to sync entire library like with iTunes. This is really a great option, only downside is the time it takes to do the synchronization. It took us approximately 30 seconds to send one 4mb song to iPod. That is pretty slow, but it speeds up a bit when sending multiple songs. We only figure that the most time is wasted on connecting and disconnecting to iPod's database.
Following icon is podcast menu, containing all you need about podcasts. In this drop down menu you can subscribe to new podcasts, update existing podcasts, visit podcast directories and set up podcasts options. In options menu you can set the frequency of checking for new podcast episodes whether you wish program to automatically check it every hour, day or month, or if you prefer to do it manually. You can set download folder for podcasts, what to download when podcast update is clicked, set auto deletion of episodes older than selected time period, and much more.
Next three icons are "play selected track(s) immediately", "play selected track(s) next" and "play selected track(s) after others". They are aimp's equivalents of play, queue and add to the bottom of the list. Pretty self-explanatory, first one plays selected track(s), second one sets selected track(s) to be played after current one finishes and last one sets selected track(s) to the bottom of the playlist.
Like every good music player MediaMonkey has visualization to help you relax better while listening to your favorite song. Next button lets you select from two visualizations and configure them to better the atmosphere. Options are really thorough so we wonﾒt go through them, we will just say that if you are an enthusiast you will be thrilled. Both visualizations are nice and are on separate thread from main program, meaning you can have visualization playing in background while you modify your playlists.
Following button is "send to playlist" which lets you create new playlist or auto playlist and send desired files to it. There is not really much to say about this one since it's pretty self-explanatory. Next one is "edit properties" which is more than thorough. It of course lets you edit metadata of your music files. Track properties dialog box has several tabs all from which give you really a lot of space to enter track data. First tab is "Basic" data which is pretty much ID3 tag but with some extra options like entering Grouping, Composer and Contractor. Besides that it gives you option to get album art and track info from amazon.com and to purchase that album over internet. Next tab is "Details" where you can see some basic details about file and edit advanced information like name of lyricist, original artist, publisher and much more. Basic details that you get from this part of program are: length of track, file size in bytes, bitrate, whether it is variable bitrate or not, frequency, number of channes, play counter (number of times that you played given track), leveling and last played, as you can see pretty thorough information. Next tab is "Classification" which contains names of playlists that selected track is part of, and lets you set information about tempo, mood, occasion and quality of the track. Besides that there are 5 custom fields that let you fill in any additional information you might want to store about the track. "Lyrics" tab has just one big text box there you can fill in or read lyrics of the given song. This is something every music player should have. Next tab is "Album Art" which isn't much on the first look, but when you actually get to adding the album art pictures really surprises you with its complicity. This is not like most of other players that let you assign picture to file as an album art. Here you can add multiple pictures and set their types from front cover to publisher logotype. As you can see, every track that you own can have almost 20 pictures assigned to it. Last tabin track properties dialog box is "Virtual CD" which helps you catalog your CD collection in addition to storing parts of it on your hard drive. Though this option is only available if you buy MediaMonkey Gold hence we couldn't actually test it, we believe it to be an invaluable addition to music fanatics who like to have everything catalogued an to know the whereabouts of their entire collection.
Next three icons are, as we mentioned before, for switching file browser's look between detailed, album art and album art with details look. We found first one (detailed) to be most satisfying when browsing through our files and folders. "Show track browser" icon shows/hides track browser part of program which is truly a lot of help when browsing big folders trying to find specific song. It consists of three parts, "Genre", "Artist" and "Album", which scan all files in selected folder and arrange them in categories buy genre, artist and album respectively. Say you are trying to find Metallica's "The Unforgiven" song in folder containing most of your songs. You would click under genre on metal, artist list would change only to metal artists, then you would click on Metallica under artist and album list would only show you albums from Metallica. There you click on Black Album and there you have it. As you can see really helpful addition to default file browser.
Last part of this toolbar i a combo box and a search button, which are used to search for specific song, artist or album. You can search your current selection, entire library, filtered library, amazon.com, eMusic, google, Wikipedia and set options for searching. Some of the options are setting search mode for different nodes of program and setting which fields you would like for program to search including song title, artist, composer, grouping and much more. Quite a thorough search function if you ask us.
Now lets finally cover menu for all you who were impatient about tweaking. Well, menu like every good menu, starts with File category. In this drop down list you can select to add new file or URL to current playlist, add tracks to the library or rescan them for changes, locate moved or missing files which happens if libraries path to file has been changed or file has been moved but that was not corrected in library itself, maintain library by removing unused albums and artists, optimizing database etc. You can also clear library completely, manage filters meaning change which files you wish to be shown, create reports like track listing in different formats (XLS, HTML etc.) and statistics, create playlist file from current playlist and of course exit program.
Next menu category is Edit where you can manipulate selections and copy/paste/cut files. Also this category includes creating of the playlists and podcast options same as with the podcast button mentioned earlier in this text. Also in this category we have Track properties and search function all mentioned earlier.
View category lets you set appearance of main program as well as configure visualization. Most of the options about appearance we have already covered, only new thing here is setting up which toolbars you wish to be shown and party mode. This is really interesting and useful option. When enabled MediaMonkey takes all screen space and is set as topmost meaning no other window can be shown but MediaMonkey in this mode. It also removes some of the options that have nothing to do purely with playback. As you can just guess this is great for parties if you like letting other people choose music.
Under Play category we have all the options concerning playback with a couple of additions. There are Play now, play next and play last options explained earlier, regular play, pause, stop, stop after current, previous, next, but there is also sleep function which lets you set the time for your computer to auto shutdown if you wish to go to sleep while listening to music. This option is available only to paying members though. In this category you can also turn on/off options such as crossfade, shuffle, continuous playback, Audio-DJ which automatically adds new songs to current playlist and enable/disable volume leveling for analyzed tracks.
Next category is "Tools" which is the most important one. It contains most of the previously discussed options and settings but all under one "roof". Here you can edit tags of songs, or even set them to be automatically filled, get album or track infoﾒs and artwork from internet rip and burn audio cd's, convert audio format of files synchronize portable devices, analyze volumes and much more. One of the best options here is extensions and scripts existence. With scripts you can literally automate anything, provided you know how to write scripts, and extensions can give MediaMonkey some new features or change the existing to suite you better. As you can see this is one very professionally made application.
All this aside the absolutely most important button here is options, which lets you customize almost everything. From file types associated to MediaMonkey to skins. In general category you can set associated file types as we mentioned, change or create new hotkeys, set confirmations, edit party mode options (like set a password, enable total lockdown during party mode, prevent switching to other applications and much more), you can also set network proxy and feedback settings if needed and edit some performance settings.
Under Player section thera are really a lot of options to cover in this review so we will only talk about a few. One of great options is to select whether you wish to use MediaMonkey's internal player or Winamp. This is present so that if there are some winamp plugins incompatible with MediaMonkey that you wish to use, you can use them without problem. Of course MediaMonkey has its own set of plugins that you can enable, disable or even edit.
Last big section is Library, where you can edit all kinds of settings concerning programs library. Here you can set not only strictly library related settings but also settings for virtual cd, filters and search. In Tags & Playlists sub-section you can chose ID3 tag encoding, which version of ID3 tag you wish mp3 files to use set program to warn you if duplicate files are added to playlist and much more. Auto-organize sub-category is supposed to automatically organize your library by rules provided by user, but it is enabled only in Gold a.k.a. payed edition of the program.
Of course as any good application MediaMonkey has very thorough help file which tells you everything you need to know about all of the options, if you bother to read it. Help file is very nicely organized and easy to understand and use.
One more thing that we found very refreshing is option to "transform" application to smaller form with click of the button. A small button tight before minimize button on top of the window is in charge of that. You can select whether you wish to use Micro or Mini version of the player. Micro version transforms it in winamp like program, and micro minimizes it to toolbar where you can control it by right clicking the program's icon. We can only give one suggestion to developers to make this even better: make an option to transform player like aimp when minimized and you have the best one out there.
Simply put, MediaMonkey exceeded our expectations by far, and we can safely say that we have seen one of the most powerful tools for working with audio files at its best that easily leaves the competition far behind. Sure you cant use it as complete replacement to iTunes for it's lack of video and apple application support, but it can certainly replace it in the field of audio files. We really have nothing more to add and can safely fully recommend it to everyone.
At first glimpse of the application you can see that it is really professionally made. During installation process you will be asked whether you wish it to use current windows theme or its own skins, which can of course be changed at any time through Options menu. While testing, we first let it use current windows theme, which by no surprise looks pretty default save for some icons. When we used applications own skin, we noticed that it quite resembles iTunes skin. This is not really surprising either as we believe the application to be created as a sort of replacement for iTunes. Of course there other skins to set up and download.
Main window can be a bit overwhelming when you fire up MediaMonkey for the first time, especially if you haven't used iTunes before. Tons of options and information displayed in relatively small space (of course this depends of your monitor size), but still it is not overcrowded. Everything has its place and is composed perfectly once you get accustomed to it. Most of the main window is reserved for file browser. On the left part there is tree view of your hard disks and currently connected USB drives. Apart from that the tree view contains Web part which has links to internet music stores, Net Radio which contains shoutcasts directory, podcast subscriptions, playlists and library. Podcast subscriptions and playlists need no explaining since they speak for themselves. Now library has exactly the same function as with iTunes, you are supposed to let it scan your hard disks and add all your songs to it. We are not really a big fans of this practice but we can see how this is needed. In the center of the main window there is a list of files in the current folder you are in, but only of those of supported format. This is really convenient, so users don't mess anything up trying to make program play .doc or .exe file, and this prevents misclicking on wrong file as well. Of course if you have selected a playlist file this part of program shows you entire playlist and lets you play the desired song.
Right part of the main window holds Now Playing list, which as its name says shows you playlist and track that you are currently playing. This is present so you can browse through other places and add files to your current playlist with ease. Lower part is reserved for player itself, with pretty basic buttons like play/pause, next song, previous song etc. Of course there is seek bar and song information panel, with a few buttons of its own like show/hide playlist, turn shuffle and/or continuous playback on/off and inevitable equalizer. Equalizer is pretty basic with options to twist sound reproduction a bit and save/load presets. Nothing new and revolutionary here.
Top of the window is, as always, reserved for menu and options. If you like tweaking your programs, you are in for a treat here. Besides three different views of file browser there are a lot of options for changing the way MediaMonkey looks and behaves, but we will take a look at that shortly. Lets first cover toolbar with icons. First one is for ripping audio cd's to hard drive. It can rip CD's in mp3,WMA,OGG,WAV or FLAC format. Of course there are settings for every format to help you get desired quality/file size ratio. Default destination for ripped songs is "C:\My Music", but that can be easily changed with just a few clicks. MediaMonkey even lets you chose the format in which the ripped files will be named, ranging from "artist - song" through "genre\year\artist - title" to "album\track, artist - title". As you can see very thorough ripping process. For a 20 track audio CD it took about 3-4 minutes to rip which is fairly good.
Next icon represents CD/DVD burning tool. We must say that we are not impressed with this one, but mainly for the reason we noted a bit earlier in this text. We don't practice letting programs create library from our hard disks, and this burner can only burn files from programs library. We would strongly suggest developers to add a simple file browser to this burner and not limit it to burning only music which would make him a lot more useful, even maybe let it replace your default CD/DVD burning software (hey why installing two programs when you can do everything in one). Apart from that MediaMonkey's burner is pretty good.
Next icon is "send to portable device" option which changes its look depending on what portable device is currently connected. We have tested this option with iPod Touch 2G and 3.1.2 firmware. If you hate iTunes process of synchronization as much as we do, you will love this option. It lets you send to your iPod or iPhone single or multiple audio files without having to sync entire library like with iTunes. This is really a great option, only downside is the time it takes to do the synchronization. It took us approximately 30 seconds to send one 4mb song to iPod. That is pretty slow, but it speeds up a bit when sending multiple songs. We only figure that the most time is wasted on connecting and disconnecting to iPod's database.
Following icon is podcast menu, containing all you need about podcasts. In this drop down menu you can subscribe to new podcasts, update existing podcasts, visit podcast directories and set up podcasts options. In options menu you can set the frequency of checking for new podcast episodes whether you wish program to automatically check it every hour, day or month, or if you prefer to do it manually. You can set download folder for podcasts, what to download when podcast update is clicked, set auto deletion of episodes older than selected time period, and much more.
Next three icons are "play selected track(s) immediately", "play selected track(s) next" and "play selected track(s) after others". They are aimp's equivalents of play, queue and add to the bottom of the list. Pretty self-explanatory, first one plays selected track(s), second one sets selected track(s) to be played after current one finishes and last one sets selected track(s) to the bottom of the playlist.
Like every good music player MediaMonkey has visualization to help you relax better while listening to your favorite song. Next button lets you select from two visualizations and configure them to better the atmosphere. Options are really thorough so we wonﾒt go through them, we will just say that if you are an enthusiast you will be thrilled. Both visualizations are nice and are on separate thread from main program, meaning you can have visualization playing in background while you modify your playlists.
Following button is "send to playlist" which lets you create new playlist or auto playlist and send desired files to it. There is not really much to say about this one since it's pretty self-explanatory. Next one is "edit properties" which is more than thorough. It of course lets you edit metadata of your music files. Track properties dialog box has several tabs all from which give you really a lot of space to enter track data. First tab is "Basic" data which is pretty much ID3 tag but with some extra options like entering Grouping, Composer and Contractor. Besides that it gives you option to get album art and track info from amazon.com and to purchase that album over internet. Next tab is "Details" where you can see some basic details about file and edit advanced information like name of lyricist, original artist, publisher and much more. Basic details that you get from this part of program are: length of track, file size in bytes, bitrate, whether it is variable bitrate or not, frequency, number of channes, play counter (number of times that you played given track), leveling and last played, as you can see pretty thorough information. Next tab is "Classification" which contains names of playlists that selected track is part of, and lets you set information about tempo, mood, occasion and quality of the track. Besides that there are 5 custom fields that let you fill in any additional information you might want to store about the track. "Lyrics" tab has just one big text box there you can fill in or read lyrics of the given song. This is something every music player should have. Next tab is "Album Art" which isn't much on the first look, but when you actually get to adding the album art pictures really surprises you with its complicity. This is not like most of other players that let you assign picture to file as an album art. Here you can add multiple pictures and set their types from front cover to publisher logotype. As you can see, every track that you own can have almost 20 pictures assigned to it. Last tabin track properties dialog box is "Virtual CD" which helps you catalog your CD collection in addition to storing parts of it on your hard drive. Though this option is only available if you buy MediaMonkey Gold hence we couldn't actually test it, we believe it to be an invaluable addition to music fanatics who like to have everything catalogued an to know the whereabouts of their entire collection.
Next three icons are, as we mentioned before, for switching file browser's look between detailed, album art and album art with details look. We found first one (detailed) to be most satisfying when browsing through our files and folders. "Show track browser" icon shows/hides track browser part of program which is truly a lot of help when browsing big folders trying to find specific song. It consists of three parts, "Genre", "Artist" and "Album", which scan all files in selected folder and arrange them in categories buy genre, artist and album respectively. Say you are trying to find Metallica's "The Unforgiven" song in folder containing most of your songs. You would click under genre on metal, artist list would change only to metal artists, then you would click on Metallica under artist and album list would only show you albums from Metallica. There you click on Black Album and there you have it. As you can see really helpful addition to default file browser.
Last part of this toolbar i a combo box and a search button, which are used to search for specific song, artist or album. You can search your current selection, entire library, filtered library, amazon.com, eMusic, google, Wikipedia and set options for searching. Some of the options are setting search mode for different nodes of program and setting which fields you would like for program to search including song title, artist, composer, grouping and much more. Quite a thorough search function if you ask us.
Now lets finally cover menu for all you who were impatient about tweaking. Well, menu like every good menu, starts with File category. In this drop down list you can select to add new file or URL to current playlist, add tracks to the library or rescan them for changes, locate moved or missing files which happens if libraries path to file has been changed or file has been moved but that was not corrected in library itself, maintain library by removing unused albums and artists, optimizing database etc. You can also clear library completely, manage filters meaning change which files you wish to be shown, create reports like track listing in different formats (XLS, HTML etc.) and statistics, create playlist file from current playlist and of course exit program.
Next menu category is Edit where you can manipulate selections and copy/paste/cut files. Also this category includes creating of the playlists and podcast options same as with the podcast button mentioned earlier in this text. Also in this category we have Track properties and search function all mentioned earlier.
View category lets you set appearance of main program as well as configure visualization. Most of the options about appearance we have already covered, only new thing here is setting up which toolbars you wish to be shown and party mode. This is really interesting and useful option. When enabled MediaMonkey takes all screen space and is set as topmost meaning no other window can be shown but MediaMonkey in this mode. It also removes some of the options that have nothing to do purely with playback. As you can just guess this is great for parties if you like letting other people choose music.
Under Play category we have all the options concerning playback with a couple of additions. There are Play now, play next and play last options explained earlier, regular play, pause, stop, stop after current, previous, next, but there is also sleep function which lets you set the time for your computer to auto shutdown if you wish to go to sleep while listening to music. This option is available only to paying members though. In this category you can also turn on/off options such as crossfade, shuffle, continuous playback, Audio-DJ which automatically adds new songs to current playlist and enable/disable volume leveling for analyzed tracks.
Next category is "Tools" which is the most important one. It contains most of the previously discussed options and settings but all under one "roof". Here you can edit tags of songs, or even set them to be automatically filled, get album or track infoﾒs and artwork from internet rip and burn audio cd's, convert audio format of files synchronize portable devices, analyze volumes and much more. One of the best options here is extensions and scripts existence. With scripts you can literally automate anything, provided you know how to write scripts, and extensions can give MediaMonkey some new features or change the existing to suite you better. As you can see this is one very professionally made application.
All this aside the absolutely most important button here is options, which lets you customize almost everything. From file types associated to MediaMonkey to skins. In general category you can set associated file types as we mentioned, change or create new hotkeys, set confirmations, edit party mode options (like set a password, enable total lockdown during party mode, prevent switching to other applications and much more), you can also set network proxy and feedback settings if needed and edit some performance settings.
Under Player section thera are really a lot of options to cover in this review so we will only talk about a few. One of great options is to select whether you wish to use MediaMonkey's internal player or Winamp. This is present so that if there are some winamp plugins incompatible with MediaMonkey that you wish to use, you can use them without problem. Of course MediaMonkey has its own set of plugins that you can enable, disable or even edit.
Last big section is Library, where you can edit all kinds of settings concerning programs library. Here you can set not only strictly library related settings but also settings for virtual cd, filters and search. In Tags & Playlists sub-section you can chose ID3 tag encoding, which version of ID3 tag you wish mp3 files to use set program to warn you if duplicate files are added to playlist and much more. Auto-organize sub-category is supposed to automatically organize your library by rules provided by user, but it is enabled only in Gold a.k.a. payed edition of the program.
Of course as any good application MediaMonkey has very thorough help file which tells you everything you need to know about all of the options, if you bother to read it. Help file is very nicely organized and easy to understand and use.
One more thing that we found very refreshing is option to "transform" application to smaller form with click of the button. A small button tight before minimize button on top of the window is in charge of that. You can select whether you wish to use Micro or Mini version of the player. Micro version transforms it in winamp like program, and micro minimizes it to toolbar where you can control it by right clicking the program's icon. We can only give one suggestion to developers to make this even better: make an option to transform player like aimp when minimized and you have the best one out there.
Simply put, MediaMonkey exceeded our expectations by far, and we can safely say that we have seen one of the most powerful tools for working with audio files at its best that easily leaves the competition far behind. Sure you cant use it as complete replacement to iTunes for it's lack of video and apple application support, but it can certainly replace it in the field of audio files. We really have nothing more to add and can safely fully recommend it to everyone.
Editor's Ratings
| User Interface: |
Features: | Ease of use: | Cost: | Overall: |
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Screenshots:
| Downloads: | 234 |
| Editor's Review: | reading! |
| Publisher: | Ventis Media |
| Publisher All: | No more programs |
| Publisher Home: | http://www.mediamonkey.com/ |
| OS Suport: | Windows All |
| Licence: | Freeware |
| Date Added: | 2010-08-16 |
| Size: | 10.0 MB |
| Cost: | Free |
| User rating: |
NOT RATED
out of 0 votes |
| Editors Rating: |
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