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Despite a glut of free player/encoders, it's tough to find one that meets our expectations. Formerly known as Sound DB, MediaMonkey has excellent library-management tools that keep the largest digital music collections well-organized. Stir that up with tight Winamp and Nero CD-burning integration, a stellar interface, a full-featured encoder, and the ability to sync with portable audio devices such as the iPod, and you have a pretty compelling product.
Upon first launch, the program prompts you to scan your drive for any supported digital media files to add them to the library. Files are sorted based on the ID3 tag, and helpful Auto-Rename and Auto-Tag From Filename features keep untagged tracks from falling through the cracks. Third-party plug-ins are available from the site if you want to tinker with the playback and encoding engine or add additional sound-processing effects. The interface is well-designed, with clean, colorful icons throughout.
Considering the overall polish of this application, you'll be hard-pressed to find anything you don't like. Although it's definitely geared toward managing extensive collections, just about anyone will appreciate the comprehensive feature set. For $20, MediaMonkey Gold adds advanced features such as sleep, scripting, and previewing.
MediaMonkey Standard - Manage large media collections - Download Video Previews:Publisher's Description
From Ventis Media:
MediaMonkey is a music manager and media jukebox for serious music collectors. It catalogs your CDs, OGG, WMA, MPC, FLAC, APE, and MP3 audio files. It looks up missing album, art, and track information via Freedb and the Web, and includes an intelligent tag editor and an automated file and directory renamer to organize your music library. It includes a CD ripper, CD burner, and audio converter for saving music, and manual or automated play list editors for creating music mixes. Its player automatically adjusts volume levels so that you don't have continually fiddle with the volume control and supports hundreds of Winamp plug-ins and visualizations; or if you prefer, it can use Winamp as the default player.
It also includes portable audio device synchronization that allows you to synch tracks and play lists with portable audio devices. Version 2.3.1.845 includes Flac playback and tagging support, WAV tagging, and added wheel scrolling on mouse over on main panel.
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All versions:
4.0 starsout of 1,312 votes
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Current version:
4.4 starsout of 30 votes
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My rating:
Write review
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"I left iTunes for this"
Version: MediaMonkey 2.3.1.845
Pros
It's just so much near perfection. It doesn't only make your music-collection sound great, it's also a very userfriendly program for organizing your music.
From renaming your files to editing tags, it's just so very easy with Mediamonkey! I made my crappy organized music-collection of over a 1000 songs perfectly organized in les than half an hour! It's also not a memory-hog, something iTunes and Windows Mediaplayer really are! Only 5MB of ram used!
Also smart playlists can be made with this fantastic program! You can sync with any MP3-player you can imagine. And you can make it look like iTunes (I like the brushed metal look). Ripping and burning are also included and you can complete ID3-tags through amazon or other online sources.
You can also go to sleep with your favorite songs. It just plays for a set amount of time and you can even tell Mediamonkey to shut down or even fade out. When you stop a song it doesn't just stop, it also fades out. Mediamonkey also has an increddibly powerful search function! You can also use any Winamp Plug-in you have, it's perfectly compatible!
It also works with very handy shortcut keys. You can categorize your songs buy : mood, tempo, occasion, quallity and rating!
I just can't recommend this player highly enough, just try it and you'll be convinced, I even bought the GOLD-version!
Cons
It doesn't have drag'n drop support but that's something I can live with considering all the above :-D
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"this IS the tool to manage huge (and small) libraries"
Version: MediaMonkey 2.3.1.845
Pros
it?s fast, has a intuitive explorer"style", easy to use, exact and well working (auto)tagging functions especially "Auto-Tag from Amazon", it works with many winamp plugins, knows all important file types, various styles
Cons
i?ve never heard about it before (ok, not really a con...but there are none!)
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"Extremely impressive!"
Version: MediaMonkey 2.3.1.845
Pros
I have a large music collection and I found this program while looking for a utility to quickly update my tags. I downloaded the free version and was blown away by the speed and power of this little program. The tag utilities represent only a tiny fraction of the features available in this software. I have used several other 'popular' music programs and all of them struggle when working with large libraries. Mediamonkey amazingly fast and it had a minimal impact on system resources. It has an unbelievable number of features. I was so grateful at how much time and headache that this program saved me that I paid for the full license.
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"Amazing program!"
Version: MediaMonkey 2.3.1.845
Pros
This program is what I've been dreaming of for mp3 organisation. I have a huge collection and it was a real pain organising everything, especially when I felt I needed a new outlook on the files. It's great it's free too, I love free stuff! I was able to convert all my files from one type of organisation (Genre/Artist - Album) to another (Letter\Artist\Album) in only a few hours, when it would take me days on any other program!
Cons
The lack of freedb for looking up album information of mp3 albums, freedb is only limited to when you are ripping files. Uses a bit of memory.
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"trying to get media info locked up the program"
Version: MediaMonkey 2.3.1.845
Pros
looks like it does a lot, but didn't get to try any of it.
Cons
It locked up trying to get the media info when I went to rip it for my mp3 player.
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"Outstanding"
Version: MediaMonkey 2.3.1.845
Pros
Migrated all my stuff from MusicMatch, the hideous bloatware that came with my MP3 player. Its quirks took a little getting used to, but now I have, I don't know why I persisted with MusicMatch so long. This is so superior. This product does almost everything you could want, and if you find something it doesn't do, there's a chance you can find a script or a plug-in to make it do. If not, you can write one yourself. It has native support for most major file formats, and I have it working with .shn and .m4a files via plug-ins.
Cons
Takes a bit of getting used to, or at least it took me a bit to get used to.
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"Slick interface but no support for mp4."
Version: MediaMonkey 2.3.1.845
Pros
Intuitive interface, appears to have many useful features, but...
Cons
It does not support mp4/aac/m4a format. Bummer.
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"The best of too many...stop wasting your time and get started!"
Version: MediaMonkey 2.3.1.845
Pros
Easy and deep. You can learn to use this product in 5 minutes if you know how to use Windows Explorer. The features are rich, and useful. I love software that allows me to delete other simple utilities in favor of a better, streamlined toolset. Price is right-Free, or $30 for a lifetime of upgrades. Looks nice, automatic synchronization, tag editing, batch tag editing, various tools to help you identify missing tag information, a media player, cd burning, etc...This is the product you need. I tried out multiple other products, and this was, far and above, the very best. All the hype you hear about iPods is just that! With this software you can buy a cheaper MP3 player, and have a better than iPod experience. I wonder why Apple hasn't purchased this development team yet. This is what iTunes should be.
Cons
iPod support for direct transfers is still in testing, but is a high priority. I expect it should be in final release in about a month or two. Support is slow. (email and forum requests only)
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"I lIke it"
Version: MediaMonkey 2.3.1.845
Pros
Great program, MediaMonkey's free program, i would buy if for a reasonable prize, its got a great interface, and quality set-up.
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"Some Features Great, Others not so good"
Version: MediaMonkey 2.3.1.845
Pros
Works great as a music management system and has a lot of neat features. Much better than Itunes
Cons
To rate a product good I expect all of its features to work well. Ripping CD's to hard drive and converting WAV to MP3 does not work well for me. I have a good computer, I researched a lot of different FAQ's and Forums, and tried changing different settings and using different file sizes and it was still very inconsistent at converting and ripping. A lot of the users in the forums suggested using WMP to convert files to MP3 which I will try, but which also suggest that this problem isn't limited to my experience. I will probably still use the software for management because some of the features regarding that are very impressive. If anyone has any ideas on what might be causing my problems I'd welcome the help. I'm using W2000 with over 500MB of RAM and a 200 (or 137GB) HD with a decent amount of space open so I would think it should handle this software. I would like to be able to use this for everything because it would be great for naming files and save me a lot of work if it does work as designed and I'm just doing something wrong.
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