MediaMonkey forum

I am a long time, paid, registered user of MMonkey and have appreciated it, usually over any like application. Strictly FYI, I have grown really weary with all the continual unfixed bugs in MM related to tags in the library and other related matters, that I started looking around again. Fortunately Gizmo put me onto MusicBee. IT IS WONDERFUL and is thus far (3 months of heavy use) flawless in handling everything and has so relieved my stress at trying to work with MMonkey.

MusicBee has a lot of similarities but without the bugs. Very clean interface, speedy, and not a resource hog. Without saying any more, I highly recommend any of you with similar frustrations at MM, to check out MusicBee.

No iPhone/iPod touch support
No wireless sync to Android devices
Cannot handle video formats
UPnP/DLNA only via a plugin

No thanks

No .. I tried MusicBee and I don't think it is up to MMW. MMW does have it's quirks and I hope that 5, the mysterious 5, will improve many things .. but as it is it works almost flawlessly with all my music/vids, syncs to 3 devices and streams to half a dozen clients.
Like i said .. MMW has it quirks but MusicBee can't touch it. But if it works better for you .. you should use it. Be sure to check the forums though .. seems to be problems there too

I don't know, I feel like I tried all of those (popular) media Players out there One of my last has been Music Bee, I kinda liked it but i barely used it because of MMW, so I didn't tested all of it's Features. But after all I read about a comparison between Music Bee and MM, it's really a matter of taste if you doesn't have any apple product that you want to sync without itunes

Hi,
I also trid it but when I got into more advanced usage, it crawled my 120k library. And searched got too many results. AlIthru I liked it at one point it was a nice try.

My main issue is Speed not looks there is few apps with nice UI and ideas.

I've used Mediamonkey for years. Have recently been using MusicBee. I have to say that Mediamonkey was slowing down so much, and no matter what I did, as I followed all the suggestions posted here, I couldn't make the library read faster. It would hang in MM for minutes if I clicked on another song while another was playing. Searches also became unbearable. It's too bad, because I loved Mediamonkey. This happened across 3 computers too, so it wasn't like one computer was terrible. I even got a blazing fast, with lots of memory computer. Musicbee is quick. It handles my 4Tb (and growing) library, and never hangs. I will keep trying Mediamonkey and updating and testing, but until the speed issue is every fixed for me, it is unusable.

> No iPhone/iPod touch support

Don't care.

> No wireless sync to Android devices

Don't care; I'm never going to sync my 1.5TB library. Well, not for a few years, anyway..

> Cannot handle video formats

Don't care.

> UPnP/DLNA only via a plugin

In tended not to bloat the main app, I think.

I've been struggling to make MMW work sensibly on a small Win8.1 tablet recently, but it doesn't work well with a touch interface. So I dug out MusicBee and gave it a go. Whilst there are a few rough edges, with the library loading and tablet viewport issues for the setting UIs, thereare things MM could learn:

1) touch interface integration. MM doesn't seem to like touch scrolling, and some UI actions are practically impossible without a mouse.
2) context views. I like MB's multiple views, depending on what you're doing. I like the scrolling album/artist selection, and that this makes the tracks selectable; I'd been considering suggesting just this feature for MM'
3) integration with online metadata, artwork and info sources, e.g. lyrics. I've fought long and hard for album artwork, doing scanning, or fighting with the various artwork search tools in MM, none of which work very well. MB seems to find high quality artwork for most of my collection. even though I might prefer it to use my artwork... It's done seamlessly.
4) equaliser and effects DSP (e.g. enhanced stereo).
5) memory use. I could not use a scrolling/swiping artwork selector on the 1GB tablet with MMW. MB is quite happy to do this.

I've been using MB for a total of one day, but I have it working on the tablet better than MMW, which I have been using for about six years. I'm pretty sure I'll be sticking with MB on the tablet as a DMC, but use MMW on my desktop machines for library work (not sure about artwork...) and playing.

nohitter151 wrote:No iPhone/iPod touch support
No wireless sync to Android devices
Cannot handle video formats
UPnP/DLNA only via a plugin

No thanks

You say that as if sync is perfected in MM, which is far from the case. And I'm probably not alone in using a stand alone app/program for video, instead of my music player.

nohitter151 wrote:No iPhone/iPod touch support
No wireless sync to Android devices
Cannot handle video formats
UPnP/DLNA only via a plugin

No thanks

• Don't Care, I don't use an iPhone or iPod touch
• Didn't care when I had an Android; I gotta plug in to charge anyway. Might as well plug in to my computer to sync
• I want a music manager. I use Kodi for video
• UPnP/DLNA only via plugin? Don't care. I have equipment that deals with playing music in different areas of my house.

My Media Monkey database is over 500MB for 64K files. My entire MusicBee installation is under 200MB. including all the pictures it's been downloading. Nothing missing that I can find. I can click around multiple views, searches, and sorts, without fragmenting my database. It would seem that I can't do that in MM. (No two-way sync, but I'm used to that.)

MusicBee looks like it was written in this decade. MMW looks like a holdover from 9X. You can tell me all day about how looks aren't important, but I don't buy it. MusicBee is not embarassing to have running on my computer at work. Except for the audio, the only interface with the software is visual. Looks matter in software.

I do like Media Monkey for tagging files though. I suspect I'll keep it around for that. I have a lifetime license, and it works great when I don't push it. A spreadsheet style interface is nice for doing data work.

When I ditched iTunes, all I really wanted was the old-school Winamp, but that wasn't an option. I already manage my library with folders and playlists. Anything else is a bonus. When I picked Media Monkey, it was literally the only application that did not choke on my library. That is no longer the case.

I haven't fully committed to MusicBee yet. I'm still looking at Helium, and Kodi. All software has problems. I can forgive issues in software. (I do regularly.) I can forgive losing data. (I have, regularly.) The stuff that that puts it over the edge is the inconsistencies in the interface. Haven't found many in those other applications, I'm sure they're there, but I have confidence they'll be fixed. These types of issues always make me wonder what other problems are lurking below the surface, what else did the programmers forget to fix.

Example;
Default installation; enable the Context menu shortcuts on the menu bar, and the "Tools" button looks like a button, but it doesn't act like one. You have to click the down arrow next to it. It's been that way for a while.

*Edit to fix list, and add;

We've been hearing about MM5 for a while now, and it's still just vapor-ware.

• Steven over at Music Bee puts out pretty consistent, large updates, and he's just one guy working on it in his spare time.
• Helium is putting out some consistent updates.
• Kodi is Open Source. It's vetted by more people than I can count.

If people want these specific items only you can do, these other products will do it. Until then, Media Monkey is a Niche product. I would suspect that the niche is shrinking in general.

And MediaMonkey puts out updates regularly: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... 54426&sd=d

Lowlander wrote:And MediaMonkey puts out updates regularly: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... 54426&sd=d

The tools button on the shortcut bar has not behaved like a button for as long as I remember. It would seem that sync is not rock solid consistent either. Somehow I keep fragmenting my database by sorting through my library. A problem that I had in 2011 still crops up 5 years later. The brown color scheme hasn't been popular since the Zune came out.

But yes, you do put out regular updates.

Turns out, I would have to go through my library again in Music Bee. Some of the tags I synchronized to my files are only readable in Media Monkey. Music Bee, Windows Media Player and Mp3tag see the tags as empty. That's unfortunate, maybe I'll just stick with Media Monkey after all.

For me, the most important thing for a music player is tag safety.
Is it a tag safe application? Does it change tags without the users' knowledge?

NewtonBoy wrote:Turns out, I would have to go through my library again in Music Bee. Some of the tags I synchronized to my files are only readable in Media Monkey. Music Bee, Windows Media Player and Mp3tag see the tags as empty. That's unfortunate, maybe I'll just stick with Media Monkey after all.

Which tags? All of my mediamonkey custom tags show up just fine in Musicbee and MP3tag.

theta_wave wrote:Which tags? All of my mediamonkey custom tags show up just fine in Musicbee and MP3tag.

Random tags which were written before discovering issues with my database. The majority are fine, but not 100%.

These weren't custom tags. These were items such as "Album" and "Artist." It wasn't all tracks, it was individual files within random albums.

The funny thing is that if I use the Media Monkey feature to find files with un-synchronized tags, it won't find these items. If I select the specific files and go through the Advanced tag / Synchronize tags, It writes them just fine, and other software can read the tags just fine.

Just more of my usual issues with my apparently unconventional method of using Media Monkey.