I switched to MediaMonkey, and this is why...

[MaFt]

i think a lot of people moved from musicmatch to media monkey for the sole reason that it went rubbish when yahoo bought them out...

i was one of them too

MaFt

[urlwolf]

I moved from Jriver media center just because of:
(1) amazon tagging
(2) scripts
(3) integration with audioscrobbler

BUT, I have to say that I have timed the searches in MC and MM and MC is faster. About twice as fast (!). I have 162 Gb of music, in many formats, but mainly ogg.

Can someone post their experiences? Did you find any other player doing faster searches?

[Steegy]

With the searches, do you mean?
1) Searching the library using the search box or search dialog
2) Adding / (re)scanning files into the library

[Cemtas]

Hi everybody,

I've been using MM for over a year now and have recently purchased a lifetime gold license

My music collection consists of about 50,000 songs (+/- 300 GB). MM is the only program I know of, which lets me deal with this properly and quickly. I also love the fact that the database is kept in an MS Access file, which is open and accessible for other programs. I frequently create my own reports and queries from within Access.

Also the availability of lots of 3rd party scripts and the contributions of the enthousiastic community are very important to me, thanks to all .

The only "problem" I now have is not being able to use the MM database with the Music Player front-end built in the MCE 2005 (which my less computer savvy family members use in the living room to listen to the music), but you can't have it all, can you

Cheers,

Cem
(from the Netherlands)

[Lowlander]

There have been some wishes to make MediaMonkey itself more media center friendly. This doesn't mean integration with MCE, but a MCE mode for MediaMonkey. Just like the current party mode. Some small improvements might come our way in the next releases like browse by album art.

Anyway I haven't had much trouble myself (I use Meedio) as my songs are well tagged. The thing I miss about MediaMonkey (when in Meedio) is the auto-playlists. I did create a script to be able to export playlists to the Meedio format. You should have less problems as MCE most likely supports m3u playlists which MediaMonkey already creates. Just check out the scripts forum for playlist export scripts (to do bulk exports) if this is something you need.

[Nova5]

So I payed for a lifetime edition of MusicMatch at least 4 years ago and loved it for a while...
Over time, however, the program and it's updates became bulky, slow, and buggy. Each version seemed to create more headaches and crashes while half of my submissions to the tech support were never answered.
It had/has it's advantages - and I will have to say that it's user interface is supreme as far as the main window is concerned, but with my 3 month old Athlon64 custom system it was just too darn slow - and I hated having retarded bugs keep me from viewing this, listening to that, or changing these.
I ran across MediaMonkey while I was researching an easy way to re-structure my library of 5.3 thousand Mp3PRO files with to one with artist and album subfolders.
I intended to simply use MediaMonkey for this purpose and move on back to MusicMatch. Also keep in mind that I am a rediculously loyal customer to brands which treat me well and do their job right (like, say... Seagate, IBM, or Cisco). MusicMatch did its job right for a while - but it was really starting to annoy me with it's bulkyness, it's ineffectiveness to be a "background app," and its instability.
I tested MediaMonkey and its features for about 4 hours to make sure it would do it's job right - before I let it consume my system for what I thought would be hours to restructure (a copy of) my entire music library. I will just have to say that within the first 2 hours I went crazy at how well it was put together and how light it was. Everything worked the way it was supposed to - and I tried some wierd things to see if I could get it to crash (strange situations I thought people wouldn't think to test) - and it just smiled back and kept on chuggin' along.
After poking and prodding at all the settings for those 4 hours, I decided I would give it a the chance to restructure my 5,263 file library... and after just a handful of clicks - the job was done in LESS THAN 2 SECONDS!
My jaw dropped at that point - and that was when MusicMatch lost a customer.
That aside, I am amazed at how quick the program loads up with my entire library in the database and the playlist simultaneously (which was not even possible with MusicMatch - there was not enough memory space alloted for both in that program... even though it is a beast of a resource hog). And the mouse gestures option with the tray icon is a treat - what an innovation! Oh, and when the fade in/fade out when a track is changed/stopped/fastforwarded... I could go on for hours.
I know that there is a $10 discount available at this time, but I wanted to fully support the programmers behind this work of art - so I payed the full amount for that reason. Besides, MediaMonkey saved me oh... some 80 hours worth of renaming and organizational work.
There are some things which I wish/want to be better/different but that is what the wish list is for right? At least these guys care enough to read what we ask for - and work to implement that. MusicMatch is faceless now there is no place to voice my opinion. Lessons can be learned in both directions.
All I can say to the makers is "Keep it light, keep it crash free - you guys are awesome!"

The reason it was so fast.. you left everything on the same drive. All MM had to do was issue "move" commands and windows rewrote the file locations as needed. but yes MM is a pretty damn good program from what i've seen. I was looking for a good media management program to hopefully prevent the Evil Itunes Devil from performing its own Windows Hater Majik on my computer, although i was sure i could fend of such hexs from appleware. I think shortly i will be buying MM. First i need to backup my 3 sections of my collection before i let MM have its way with reorganizing it into one combined collection. Which will take a few hours as the files are on two different drives and have to be placed on one and orged by Aritst/Album. Crossdrive movement of files takes time. MM and MP3/Tag Studio are two very good programs for my current project of cleaning up, fixing and organzing all the MP3s in my collection so they are all neatly done for my Ipod to remain sane. I didnt really want 6 different variations of the same artist, etc. each of the two programs has its own strenghts and weaknesses. Tag Studio can't do the reorg while MM can't as cleanly or flexibly tag files from the filename. (compiliation albums get a little strange in their tags at times) Tag Studio is better able to handle it as i could format the parameters it used to decide which was artist and track name with more flexibility. Tag Studio is nothing but a tag cleaning program thou, it cannot play them or sync players. AutoDJ needs a genre restriction option (directly, not through a workaround)

[Charity]

Could someone please help me I am new to this stuff and have downloaded MM and my songs that were on my ipod or no longer there and I synced ALL my songs WMA and itunes and I still cannot get them to play on my itune, I am not the smartest person at this and am new to this could someone please tell me how to get the songs on my ipod using MM???? Thanks

[mjs93]

Could someone please help me I am new to this stuff and have downloaded MM and my songs that were on my ipod or no longer there and I synced ALL my songs WMA and itunes and I still cannot get them to play on my itune, I am not the smartest person at this and am new to this could someone please tell me how to get the songs on my ipod using MM???? Thanks

The "Need Help?" forum would be the right place for your question, not this thread, but anyway. iPods cannot play WMA files. Select all your songs in MM, then go to Tools > Convert Audio Format > Format: MP3. It should work then.

[Guest]

I have been testing it to the limit with 98.000 files.

It runs perfectly with 50.000
but above the 75.000 it reaches its limits.

[trinalin]

Count me as another MusicMatch to MediaMonkey convert. I, like the original poster, had paid for the unlimited upgrades to MusicMatch because the program, when I bought it, was good. Boy, that sure changed! So I got to looking around for alternatives and MediaMonkey turned out to be the best program for library maintainence and ripping. I think I paid for it within a day of installing it.

For playing my MP3s, however, I go back to one of the oldest programs I ever downloaded off the Internets - good ol' QCD.

[Axel from Hamburg, DE]

MM is so cool because_
- my 65.000 songs, about 6.000 Albums are searched lighting fast, incredible!!
- Tagging is great
- party with 2 Sound-Devices (just using winamp as 2.nd device
drag the song on it to cue it through my Bluetooth Headset before
"activating" it in the "party-Playlist"
- ... and much more

I just play around with it, thinking daily of buing Gold Lifetime...
but there are some questions i might find in the forum here..

- Normal fading is kind of... ? I doesnt run as nice as it should ..
- searching is great when searching through title or artist alone,
but when using 65tsd of songs, it would be great to have a search
on Title & Artist. Searching on "all text fields" is somewhat slow
(what I really can understand!). So when you are making a party,
it would be perfect to search title and artist, mightbe somewhat faster..

Thank you all for this great piece of Software !!
Axel

[Lowlander]

The quick search is on all fields or one specific field. If you open the regular search or the advanced search you can specify various fields.

Fading can be handled by other plugins like sqrsoft advanced crossfading plugin. Unfortunately it doesn't work with the current MediaMonkey 2.5.2 unless you change back to the old in_mp3.dll. Search the forum for more information on this issue. Of course you can search the WinAmp plugin pages for other output plugins that could handle fading.

[KP]

I bought MusicMatch lifetime about 5 years ago... It was aewsome at the time. However, now it is just a bug filled behemouth (altough I still think it has one of the best ripper\encoding engines - whatever it is).

MM is great... and support for the users...what a concept. This community is great. Cheers to all!

[Buellie]

new to media monkey and yes i have a lifetime membership to MusicMatch and also a version 8 user if J River

MusicMatch stopped being good lotta versions ago
JRiver version 8 had a nice interface...after that the interface to me went to crap...also upgrade from 8 to 9 (pay) upgrade from 9 to 10 (pay) upgrade from 10 to 11 (pay) and im guessing that now that developement on 11 has stopped 12 will be coming out and im guessing PAY again
also write something negative in their forum...BANNED...so here i am today so far a satisfied Monkey addict.....keep up the good work keep the inteface simple and thanks

[badbrain88]

I too have just recently joined the clan of the Monkey, after trying it about a month a go and being very impressed but realising you had to pay to get sleep mode, so went back to WMP 10 (cheap b**tard).

I have been thinkin about the Monkey ever since (even to the extent I've put the background on my iriver H340 with Rockbox, if you know what that is---if not, ask and Ill shed the light). Now I'm back as wmp10 is sooo cack, especially the shuffle function, I have over 50,000 tracks so like to listen to all of them NOT just a slected 100 or so, MM is hands down the best media player for this option. Plus it synchs with my H340 and looks great (brushed...)

Long live the Monkey!!! a lifetime membership will be purchased tomorrow (pay day---yaaay) to show my appreciation for a superb piece of software and great dev's.

Well done all!!!!