Things I Like - Mediamonkey

In general I have always been fairly late to the party where digital music is concerned. In high school, I only had one disc of music that had been lent to me by a friend, and I played it on the most basic version of winamp there was. No different skins, no apps (though I don't think apps really existed then). My stay in digital music purgatory lasted until college, where I discovered the glory that was Napster. Backed by the power of the colleges T1 servers, I went on a music downloading binge. 24/7 that program was running on my laptop. I was still playing it all on winamp, but at least I had some quality music to play. After college I got my first iPod and iTunes has been a constant and often frustrating companion since then. Recently though I have been getting truly fed up with it. The software is bloated, taking up massive amounts of ram and constantly tries to get you download Safari and Mobile Me. You also never truly get rid of the feeling that you are somehow Apple's bitch. The worst aspect of the program however, was how difficult it made sorting, relabeling and adjusting your files. Most of the time, changes had to be made to individual tracks, and when your library is in excess of 5,000 songs and podcasts, that is just unacceptable. So, spurred by the fact that my girlfriend needed a program that would allow her to rebuild her library from her iPod, I searched for a suitable alternative. I found Mediamonkey.

What is it?:  a music playing software program that will play almost any music format on the planet! It comes in two flavors: Free and Gold. The Gold Edition cost a once-off payment of $20 and lets you do even more stuff but considering what Mediamonkey Free is capable of already it is only for the truly pedantic audiophile. The program is also a relative lightweight, clocking in at ~8 MB at download.

The program itself

What can it do?: What can't it do??! The amount of function this program has is cranium crushing! The most important thing is the Filter Tree on the left hand side. The Tree allows you to sort through your music library according to criteria such as Artist, Album, Composer,Genre and location of the track on your hard drive! If you don't like how it is set up, you are free to change it  so it does.To begin with the program will scan your entire hard drive for media files and include them in your new library, that includes iTunes, Windows Media and anything else you may have on your computer. There is also this lovely Tree Branch called Files to edit which will show you untagged tracks and duplicates, which the the program identifies either via the tag or by comparing the data of the tracks themselves!!! It also has a dream of an autotag function that will actually go into the internet and identify the track along with appropriate album cover.You can manage your podcasts, your playlists and net radio. Synching with you iPod is easy and it is even easier to just lift tracks or playlists from one to the other. Probably my favorite function is that Mediamonkey will analyze and adjust the volume of all your tracks! At the same time, all it takes is a few clicks! I probably have only scratched the surface of what this lovely little program as there are probably numerous apps that can be downloaded but frankly I am trying to catch my breath as is.


What's the down side?: Mediamonkey demands a lot more immersion and study than iTunes. You can get lost in the Tree pretty easily and trying to figure out everything it can do will involve a lot of trial and error but it is so incredibly worth it. It will also need some iTunes drivers and codecs, so having downloaded iTunes will be helpful.The loss of the iTunes store is unfortunate, but it is a trade-off.

Final Verdict?: I fucking love Mediamonkey. With the amount of functions this puppy boasts it would be criminal of me not to talk about it. There is one minor caveat: it's a Windows only program, so you Mac Heads will ether need to use your boot camp or just live with iTunes. On the whole though, Media monkey makes me: