Orange Mood

The main window can be divided into 6 sections:
1) Menu and toolbar
2) Navigation panel
3) Album Art window
4) Edit window
5) Player panel
6) Status bar

I won’t describe functionality that can be found in other programs. Let’s concentrate on the juiciest parts!

Library Maintenance (Menu>File)
As already mentioned, MediaMonkey is aimed at managing large media collections. Here you will find such useful functions as locate moved/missing tracks, which is very useful when you are constantly moving your library or like to organize folders manually. Maintain library option will let you always stay on track, by compressing your collection, removing unused artists and albums, etc. Here we come to a very useful function: you can create reports in HTML, XML, Excel and CVS formats or create a statistics report, which will include all imaginable Top 10’s and comprehensive analysis of your library.

Navigation (Navigation Panel)
When you possess a large collection of music files, the top priority is not to get lost. MediaMonkey offers you to navigate through your files with help of navigation tree.

Navigation Tree.


It’s very similar to File Explorer, so intuition will guide you here. I would like to stress that the navigation tree lets you to quickly jump to various view modes such as artist, album, etc. with the help of buttons at the top. You can also use back and forward buttons like you do in your favorite browser to change the views in chronological order you were browsing your library.

And here is one more juicy part. Did you notice a tree node files to edit?


Here MediaMonkey automatically shows the files that have some gaps in their tags, e.g. unknown artist or unknown album art. Now you do not have to jump through your collection to identify missing song information. This view also will show you duplicates and dead links in your library! I also suggest you to learn basic keyboard shorcuts to save your time while navigating your library, e.g. F6 to see what’s playing now or F8 to browse artists.
As expected, MediaMonkey has playlists support as well, allowing you to generate comprehensive auto playlists, so you can have such playlists like: Favorite Top 50 or Jazz style music.
Through the navigation tree you can also access Internet radios and a list of predefined media portals, categorized by content and style (MediaMonkey uses standard IE rendering engine).

Search.
Through a very comprehensive search, you may find everything you are looking for! MediaMonkey let’s you search by any field in tags and filenames. Supports search while you type and direct search on Amazon, Barns&Noble, etc.

Tools (Menu>Tools)
And here is where MediaMonkey is top winner. Bundled with impressive set of additional tools, I’ll first go through files and tags management, then describe additional features.

Organizing filenames and tags.
We all have been in a situation with nasty filenames looking like Track01, Track02 and so on. Not a problem anymore! MediaMonkey offers you auto organize files option. For example, you want all your music library files look in an identical way: Artist/Album Name, Year/Track ## Song Title. All you have to do is to select necessary files to edit and click Ctrl+R.



You can add any fields you like to name your files, as long as information is available in tags, MediaMonkey will batch rename any files you desire.
Sometimes situation is quite on the contrary: filename possess some general information about the song, but tags are blank. Here you have two options:

1. Auto-tag using Amazon.com
2. Auto-tag from filename

I suggest you using the first option as it allows not only to insert correct tags, but also download album art and description from Amazon’s reviewers. When MediaMonkey failed to download necessary information from Amazon’s server (happens sometimes as Amazon is not the most comprehensive media engine in the world), you can use the second option.
There are also some useful scripts in MediaMonkey, e.g. Case Checker, by running which you’ll get “I Love You” instead of “i lOvE YOU” in filenames and tags.
Before installing MediaMonkey my music collection was awful, a total “salad” of identifiable filenames and tags. Now everything is in its place. And it took me only 2 nights to tag my library (yeah I sleep during some other time of the day!).

Additional tools.
MediaMonkey comes with a handful of helpful tools. Their names suggest their functions so I won’t go much into details.
- CD/DVD set
o FreeDB album info
o Rip Audio CD
o Burn CD/DVD
- Convert to different audio formats
- Analyze Volume
- Create Virtual CDs (I don’t use it, so don’t ask me what is it)
- Create Previews
- Synchronization with portable devices (iPod, iRiver players full support)
- Visualization

Player (Player Window)
MediaMonkey has its own built-in player, but for some crazy people who adore Winamp so much, they can use Winamp player instead.
MediaMonkey supports all basic functions of a player and offers some exceptional ones.

Sleep Function – you can send your computer to sleep, while the volume of the player will gradually decrease, so when you are peacefully snuffling your PC automatically shuts down. Pretty handy!.

Auto DJ – selects random songs from your media library, so the music will never stop.

Party Mode – locks your computer so people can only see the MediaMonkey window and won’t be going through your computer stuff. Can be password protected as well.

Status Bar
There should be some words said about the status bar. I rarely observe such a smart use of the status bar. Whatever you do, MediaMonkey will always tell you where you are and what is going on right now. Well done!

Plug-ins and Add-ons.
Yes, MediaMonkey might not have such extensive plug-in support as Winamp, but the developers went a smart way and now almost any plug-in for Winamp will work for MediaMonkey as well. I’ll describe the most interesting add-ons I currently use.

Last.fm Plug-in. Come on! It’s web 2.0 and you have to be on last.fm! You simply download the plug-in for Winamp and use it inside MediaMonkey!

Scrobbler DJ – works as Auto DJ, but fills your playlist not randomly, but aggregates information about similar artists from (again) last.fm and inserts comparable songs, so Muse won’t be followed by Nina Simone.

Evil Lyrics – download lyrics and karaoke, that will be automatically displayed while you are playing any song. No configuration is required for MediaMonkey.

Skins Support – I would say that skin support is done poorly. You won’t be able to change the look of the player like in only done in 5.x version Winamp. But MediaMonkey will improve, I’m sure.

General Drawbacks.
Nothing can be perfect, especially when it’s only version 2.x. Here is the list of what I would like to see in MediaMonkey next generation.
1. Browsing done like in Windows Media Player or Helium 2007, when you have large icons for albums or artists.
2. Global hotkeys configuration. Right now you can’t define your own hotkeys.
3. Native support of last.fm. Ability to query information about artists and albums from last.fm not only Amazon.
4. Better skin support.
5. Support of Gracenote DB to identify unknown tracks. Successfully implemented in the latest version of Winamp.
6. Ability to export library into browseable site, like in OrangeCD.
7. Native support of Evil Lyrics.

Conclusion.
Right now MediaMonkey is the best player on the market for managing and maintaining large music collections with support of auto-tagging, and batch file renaming. Intuitive browsing of your library and manifold views give you an outstanding control over your collection. Support of Internet radios and well-known online media services along with smart plugins make it easy to switch to MediaMonkey.

Rating.

FEATURES: 10/10;
GUI: 8/10;
USABILITY: 9/10;
OVERALL: 9.