My Review of Media Monkey for Android

[sirandar]

It is a great thing that Ventis decided to support Android. Media Monkey for windows really is a gift for people who actually appreciate music and it really is almost the only way to listen to a large base of music without relying on pre-canned playlists. I think of it as my own personal radio station stocked with only music I like AND I can generate a new custom playlist exactly tailored to my mood in 10 sec even though I have 1000s of tracks. Why can I do this? Because MM was designed to do this as everything I need to do that is visible right from the Library view AND MM makes complex tagging simple.

Apple's offerings don't really offer this because they correctly assume that most wouldn't be bothered to tag as collection properly enough to make the level of sophistication of Media Monkey worthwhile, so they make sure their software is pretty and easy to use.

I don't know which audience Media Monkey for Android is targeting but it seems like it is shooting for the Apple crowd. The reason I say that is that MMA doesn't seem to leverage any of the strengths of Media Monkey for Windows and really doesn't seem to do any more than the stock Android ICS player (I may be missing something). MMA is pretty and runs very well on my HTC.

MMA doesn't seem like it was made for MM users. When looking at tracks, the album cover is there, which is great eye candy, but there is no track ratings or other info available. How can I quickly know if I want to play a track if I can't very quickly get info about it? This is Apples way of doing things. After noticing this I thought surely the Search function would allow me search for tracks with a given mood and rating from a given artist. No, search is standard Android, which is next to useless for music searches.

MMA is a great start that runs very smoothly on my HTC but it really needs features specific to Media Monkey tagging and at least track ratings visible in the MMA equivalent of the library view. Giving the user a choice of which fields to display in the Library view would be revolutionary and I would like to see mood there because this is a typical scenario:

You are somewhere doing something and in the mood to listen to a particular kind of music, lets say tracks that have a tranquil mood. You have 3 choices: 1) play the precanned playlist that best matches your tranquil mood (maybe for the 10th time) 2) Make a playlist that contains every single tranquil track in the library and play it (not bad) 3) Quickly display every tranquil track with a 4+ rating in your library and pick the exact ones that fit your mood.

Media Monkey for Windows allows me to make the 3rd choice when I want to.

The last aspect relating to MMA is that almost all the big phone companies are trying to force a revolution. They are trying to force us to on-line music. They are doing this by offering free on-line music storage services and stunting the development of smartphones so they don't support microSD and have puny built in storage (Samsung doesn't do this, Apple has been doing it forever). On-line offerings are currently crap but they may actually become feasible over time. Unless MMA eventually allows us to reliably stream our collections from our home computer and have a searchable catalog of our home tracks on our phone, it may just get lost in the shuffle.

[sirandar]

This is my impression but it seems that Android and MediaMonkey were made for each other.

Why? I am guessing that Media Monkey has a reasonably large install base on X86. Looking at myself and my peers I ask what kind of person installs, uses and pays for Media Monkey? A definite picture comes to mind and for the most part it is defined by not liking much how Apple does things (or those like the hardware and are willing to put up with the software or hack). Otherwise, why not just buy a Iphone + Ipad and use Itunes and Itunes remote?

This picture also matches a lot of Android users (Although Android is becoming Apple more every day in both good and bad ways)

So why design a Android app that looks and behaves like a Apple one and not leverage all the greatness of the Media Monkey model?

[dtsig]

Just got this down yesterday (18jan) and am so far liking it very much. Have been using Winamp up to now but finding MMA great.

I like that there wasnt an attempt to bring across MM's complex UI to android. I would like to see the ability to define where MMA starts. For example I would like to start MMA and always have it start on the 'Albums' view.

But generally very happy for this.

[rovingcowboy]

Yes mma is in developement yet but is doing good for being so loaded with the features on the beta versions, if you do find any issue with it please go to the options and to the debug report and press it to send in the report so they can find the cause for your issue.