Media Monkey

By amit, 21 May, 2006
Science & Technology
I found a new media player/manager today. MediaMonkey. For a few years MusicMatch has been my media player of choice. But Media Monkey is far superior with far more features and performance than MusicMatch. Sometime around MusicMatch 8, I had bought MusicMatch Plus (with all future versions for life time). But Media Monkey offers all the features and then some for free! In just one day of playing with Media Monkey I'm completely sold!

What I like most about Media Monkey:
  1. Speed: Media Monkey is FAST! It leaves Music Match in dust. Media Monkey startup is very quick and noticeably faster in general operation.
  2. Many different ways to browse music collection: based on usual Artist, Genere, Year and also location, title, rating classification
  3. Many more media formats are supported: OGG, WMA, MP3, FLAC etc, with LAME encoder plugin (instead of Fh MP3 encoder).
  4. Media can be easily converted from any format to any format.
  5. Many ways to organize music (Music Match has only limited options) with virtually limitless possiblities. I like to organize my files in Genere\Album Artist\Album Name hierarchy. Most media players won't allow me to do that.
  6. Media Monkey has a feature called Virtual CD which allows you to catalog the physical CDs
I like some of the above features and find them useful. I rip my CDs at high bit rate in WMA format. I used to use ~400Kbps VBR WMA. Now I have started using ~200 Kbps VBR MP3 format with LAME encoder. It was extremely easy to convert about 1600 songs from WMA format to MP3 in only a few clicks with Media Monkey. Media Monkey transferred all the metadata for the songs without any trouble. There is no such feature in Music Match. I also keep a second copy of music for my mobile devices since the file sizes with high bit rate are too big. There was no easy way to re-encode huge number of files at lower bit rate with Music Match. Media Monkey made it so easy to do it.

I have decided to ditch Music Match (even if I've spent about $60 for lifetime upgrades!). The free version of Media Moneky has all the features I need except for the Media Monitor (similar to Watch Folders in Music Match). For now I'm going to stick with free version.