MM is terrible out of the box at parsing my well-organized music library

[sdanmm]

I have Plex, and it just mysteriously ignores songs in my music folders, even though I ripped these myself and they are meticulously named and tagged within a logical folder hierarchy. I decided to buy MediaMonkey Gold after a lot of research. Perhaps I should have used the free version for awhile, but it's severely crippled (contrary to claims on the website that it provides "all of the functionality that an average user would want" -- I guess the average user would never listen to his music library for more than "30 minutes at a time").

My FIRST impression of MediaMonkey was very good. It's the best interface that I've seen, and there are some bad ones out there. Overall my good-engineering radar picks up that this software looks good and ought to be good. So I had my hopes up for a brief moment that this thing would really be the ticket. It's got some features that make sense that Plex lacks (such as playing audio through the server's audio output), and Plex's interface is awkward on any device except for a TV (I suppose the one for which it was designed, and in fairness Plex is good with movies and TV shows as well as recording live TV).

My SECOND impression of MediaMonkey:

- Why can't it recognize songs that are organized in the simplest and most obvious of ways? It's naming guesses are beyond absurd. We're in the era of AI. Why does it have to take a song that is named "This Song.flac" and tagged "This Song" and then list it as "That Song". I mean, really.

I do not understand why Plex and MediaMonkey are so unbelievably, unfathomably terrible at this seemingly incredibly simple task that computers from the 80s ought to have been able to easily perform.

My THIRD impression of MediaMonkey:

- I'm annoyed at having paid over $100 ($15 for codecs) again for software that comes with zero support. Plex has zero support. MediaMonkey also appears to have zero support, not even basic setup support. I'm tired of buying software and then having to post on a forum on the off-chance that I get an answer from users, as most of the time that doesn't work very well, and it allows the software vendors to avoid supporting their software, especially if they don't monitor the forum themselves (which is very common although not universal).

The Plex forum, for example, is not useful. Some forums are great, especially for certain open-source software. At other forums you find users who are infatuated with the software and simply blame you rather than providing answers. In any case they are not associated with the company so you can get any sort of answer, from helpful to outright hostility, but often it's something along the lines of, the software is great, the problem is you. I had thought in buying MediaMonkey that I would get at least some tiny semblance of basic support, but I was wrong. There is nothing listed on the website. I was sent here.

I think my next stop is either pure open-source or coming up with a custom solution, even a jury-rigged one.

I don't want to write a long post here, but I have little choice to explain my first impressions and offer specifics.

I'm already running into problems in this first post (which may be my last). I can't post images to show people what's happening, like I would be able to with a half-decent tech support inquiry.

I get this error from the forum:

"You don’t have rights to post image, email or url links that are external to this domain. You can edit ... by inserting a space into the URL (e.g. ht tp:// website) and a moderator can later fix the link.
The username you entered is already in use, please select an alternative.
The solution you provided was incorrect
The submitted form was invalid. Try submitting again."

I added multiple spaces to the URLs but it still gives me the error. What a pain. Some companies seem to almost relish how much of our time they waste with these sorts of shenanigans.

But as for MM, I was hopeful that it would work out of the box (hence my optimism about purchasing it). So I'm let down that it is so bad at what I regard as its basic task.

I'm stunned that even browsing folders, it still won't play files right. It actually changes the names of the songs from correct names and metadata to a list that is now incorrect, even just plain folder browsing. So within a folder for Bloc Party's Silent Alarm, the filename "05. Banquet.flac" with metadata title "Banquet" is listed by MediaMonkey in that folder as "Blue Light". The song that plays is "Blue Light", which MediaMonkey lists twice in that folder. Banquet is not playable.

forum wouldn't insert these as inline or links (so, so, so stupid) or even without the h tee tee p ess:

https://ibb.co/BKjPDwFz
https://ibb.co/4gPLZb6g

That is inexcusable to me, and that is not good engineering. The folder browsing is the fallback option if the other parsing doesn't work. It's even worse if I go to Home / Music / Entire Library.

For the remix version of that album, I don't even know what MM is thinking. It gets the song titles right, but says the songs are about 3 seconds long and won't play them.

https://ibb.co/3y2gn3R0
https://ibb.co/wNKmST47

It looks to be more configurable than Plex. My question is why should I have to configure it to tell it that a song with the filename "06. The Promised Land.flac" with the metadata title "The Promised Land" is "The Promised Land" and not "Factory"? Why can MM not understand this? I'm happy to invest my time in well-designed software, but I don't want to waste my time with software that doesn't do what it should.

https://ibb.co/ZpcgXjYG
https://ibb.co/JhKNGdk

The folder structure is like:

Bruce Springsteen\1978 - Darkness on the Edge of Town\06. The Promised Land.flac

It gets the album right. But it messes up the seemingly simplest part.

Is this really rocket science?

Sure I can maybe spend dozens of hours naming things to try to please MediaMonkey -- although that does not always work with Plex -- but why should I have to do that? What it really means is that I still have not found a solution that I can recommend to others as being easy to set up. I ripped my entire CD collection, but playing it correctly, in an elegant way, and being to access all of it at once, is another thing altogether. While MediaMonkey has an appealing interface, its media parsing has been drastically worse than what I was expecting.

I am very technically capable with computers, and I have been stunned that what I thought would be the easiest part of this setup process has in fact been the hardest.

I've experimented with some other software. So far I think for music parsing using the default setup, MediaMonkey may be the worst of them all, which is a surprise. I'm not thrilled with the full experience of other software, but for example Clementine and MusicBee do better at parsing than MediaMonkey. Foobar2000 and VLC are more straightforward with metadata. I've tried Kodi and some other tools. I can't think of anything I've tried that does worse. Plex is second-worst. Both a surprise to me, since I paid over a hundred bucks for each of them and both are designed to do this.

The ridiculous thing to me is that the best solution I've come up with so far is just to browse my music folder using a Windows network folder and play a song by right-clicking and choosing the built-in Windows feature "Cast to Device" which creates a DNLA stream that is automatically started by the target device. (Stream What You Hear is a utility that does something similar, although the first method casts the digital audio file directly so is less likely to be messed up by Realtek audio drivers and the like, if you have a decent DAC at the other end.)

Or I can use any tool that simply reads a network folder without messing with it, unlike MediaMonkey. In fact, there are basic browser apps on Android that include both network folder and music support, and work better than MediaMonkey! I have an old smartphone I'm using mostly as a remote control for my receiver, and I'm open to pretty much any setup. I'm just annoyed that I spent money on this one, given how incredibly poorly it works. Some of this software is just too gimmicky. My music collection is fine. I just wanted a good interface for it that won't screw it up.

And neither Plex nor MediaMonkey seem to fit this bill. I've messed with Plex far more, granted, and it's good but I've come to see its limitations. The company does not listen to users, and does not provide support, and it adds and removes features and apps at its own whim. (I'd been using the Plex app to listen to music on Android, but it's canceled and only Plex Amp is now available.)

As of now I would recommend to my less technically inclined friends not to rip their music at all, and just keep listening to CDs. While this OUGHT to be easy, I don't think for most that it is worth the time invested. I love my CDs, but for most people just subscribing to a music service is a lot easier.

How many times have I paid for software and then wound up being mainly a beta tester and getting little use out of it?

I will say there are some incredible free tools out there -- CUETools/CUERipper, MakeMKV, MKVToolNix, HandBrake, Exact Audio Copy, FFmpeg, VLC, Foobar200, StaxRip, Shutter Encoder, and many more. For a central media server I'd hoped that Plex would be all I would need, but that's not the case. After that there are lots of choices (the Jellyfins and Kodis and DLNA and other casting), but my main goal is still to find something simple and elegant for playing my music, so that I can focus on the music and not on all these silly little tech headaches, or renaming files in silly little ways even though they are already obviously named and tagged.

Maybe a network folder and simple music player really is what I should have aimed for from the start. It's closest to the simplicity of simply popping in a CD and playing it. A lot less that can go wrong.

I have other screenshots, but I'm not even sure if those above will be accessible, or if anyone will read this. So I'm going to sign off, frustrated. And still looking for a great tool that I can use everyday, and can recommend to others. Hopefully without spending more money for products that come with zero support.

Damn!

p.s. You know, after spending 15 minutes trying to rename my links to images here so that the forum would even accept this post, I think I may be done with MM. This is not the kind of company that is thoughtful about the user experience.

[Lowlander]

1. If you're looking for help you can find it here, support is available on the forum as well as at support.

2. It sounds like you're referring to Infer properties, which auto-guesses. If your files are well organized I recommend using Tag from Filename instead as it's user configurable.

3. Links are not allowed for new users only, it's unfortunately an unnecessary spam protection feature.

4. Are you sure the files didn't already have tags in them before you added them to MediaMonkey. If a file has tags, those will be used instead of trying to infer from filename. Feel free to support an unmodified by MediaMonkey file with tagging issues to support for analysis.

5. For the files with the short length, it's likely a some corruption in the file that's causing this. Which Build (Help > About) of MediaMonkey are you using? Can you please provide a sample file with this issue to support for analysis?

[Rob_S]

This following is from a long time user who frequents this forum a lot:

First of all, MM does have a dedicated and diligent support person - Lowlander - who answers almost every post on this forum same day, and is very persistent in resolving problems.

In addition there are at least two othe MM persons who might respond to user issues from time to time.

They will persist at great length to help solve issues way beyond what I have ever seen anywhere, and if the issue is with the software, it will be noted as a bug, and users can view the status of the bugs at any time. Stable beta updates are released frequently to provide rapid resolution to such issues.

Of course sometimes more rarely if no solution can be found the answer will be that this is just the way it is, and that is that!

To do all that it does, it is by definition very complex software, and has many options that need to be explored and understood. For anything you want to do that could affect your tracks, I always reccommend to try it on a test sample of your collection, to make sure it works the way you want.

[Peke]

Hi,
First I would like to thank you for lengthy post and constructing remarks (both good and bad).

1. One thing you got wrong and that is no support. Yes there is no phone support, but please consider that MM is made by very very small team across multiple continents, using heart, passion and blood poured into it.

2. You can tweak how MM handle scanning for files in Tools -> Options -> Library, also you can manually edit MediaMonkey.INI file to further tweak algorithm. Unfortunately there is no magic bullet and mistakes happen.

3. I am with Lowlander 100%, but soon you will have all rights.

4. To add if you scan based on folder/filename structure it is very solvable with MM and with open mind to new approaches you will soon become master and give advice's to others. Using plain command line "dir /s/d/b >FileList.txt" within media folder should give you "FileList.txt" containing all the filenames and path structure.

5. Same as 2. check that options, which can help you with that.

As for PLEX, I better not start to talk about it, except that it is pale picture of itself 10+ years ago (stopped using it 7+ years ago, which I do not want to get into why, but it was ugly). Especially as there are more free solutions that do things much much better, like MM/Kodi/Sonarr/Radarr/Twonky/EMBY/...

Feel free to throw anything in our way and we alongside our users will try to do the best.

[sdanmm]

Thank you so much for the replies. This is clearly a good forum experience. I've had such mixed experiences with forums before, so I'm leery. (The main problem with this forum is that it keeps blocking my posts and making me edit so-called links.)

I wanted to share my initial impression. Which is still that MediaMonkey really should have worked out of the box (so to speak) with my music collection. No tweaking of anything should be required. These files are named and organized in about the most obvious and thorough way possible.

I have redundant information. Correct filenames, correct tags, CUE sheets, M3U playlists. Maybe too much? But they all have the same information.

What I really wanted was a no-muss-no-fuss solution when it came to recognizing my files. I don't want to have to teach the software that "Song" within "Artist" folder is "Song". It should know that already.

Mostly due to frustrations with Plex, this got more complicated than expected. I wasted some time on that, but Plex is not really easily configurable in the way that I need it to be if it's also not going to be smart.

I do believe that MM is configurable, but I had hoped that it would simply be smart.

Although with Plex too, I can tell it not to be smart, and just to trust my tags, I would prefer a smart solution, in that if the tags make sense, use them, and if not, identify the file. When I ripped my CDs I put time into that. But it would be nice going forward not to always have all music in the same exact format. It's easy when ripping a bunch of CDs to use one template. (In fact it's odd to me that Plex and MM have trouble with only certain songs and albums, given that literally every CD was ripped and named and tagged in exactly the same way.)

What is kind of incredible to me is that CD-ripping software is able to get the CD artist and tracklist correct without any filenames or tags at all! That's how I got most of these filenames and tags in the first place. And yet Plex and MM cannot identify the songs correctly even after I'd done all the work of naming, tagging, and organizing them! What is going on here? Isn't there a program that can figure this stuff out? It's not rocket science!

CUERipper, Exact Audio Copy, dBpoweramp, and others can look up the info based on very simple CD attributes. Not 100% accurately, but far more accurately than Plex or MM which have access to filenames and tags! Maybe MM could access these databases -- CTDB and AccurateRip -- or some others to help it along. Does it even check song length and things like that? Because it bungles some of these albums very badly.

I think it accesses some of the same databases -- MusicBrainz, Discogs. It says it supports "audio fingerprinting". But it sure wasn't doing that with a lot of my files. It did seem to do a bit better with more popular albums. But why so much worse on others than the ripping tools? Granted, some info is lost after the CD is ripped, like the disc data length or whatever.

But in my case using CUERipper for most of my discs, I have info files in each folder as well. So for example:

Bruce Springsteen - Darkness on the Edge of Town dot accurip
Bruce Springsteen - Darkness on the Edge of Town dot cue
Bruce Springsteen - Darkness on the Edge of Town dot log
Bruce Springsteen - Darkness on the Edge of Town dot m3u

.accurip contains the CTDB ID for the CD. .cue contains a detailed list of songs including track number, performer, and song title (and empty space and cues for recreating the CD). The .log and .m3u files are redundant given the filenames are already there. But the info is there several times over. I do think that tag and filename ought to be plenty, especially when they match, so I don't understand those being either changed or ignored.

As for support, as a user the normal support was not clear. A forum is a cop-out for support, although a forum that is monitored by someone official is a definite step-up (that's not the case at Plex, they simply close threads after three months with no answers).

Phone support is not economically feasible for a company like this (unless the cost were tripled). But I think that basic ticket support should be easier to find.

Lowlander wrote, "If you're looking for help you can find it here, support is available on the forum as well as at support."

The first link there is to documentation. The second link goes to a support Knowledge Base. There's a not-obvious-at-first second row of links there below the Support header that includes "Wiki" and "Helpdesk".

It would have been nice if it had been clearer that there was a ticket system available, because I didn't find it the first time. I found this forum. And I don't like getting all my tech support from a public forum. It's a lot of personalities to juggle just to get a simple answer. In this case, the personalities seem to be good ones, but it's the internet, so it's a roll of the dice. And writing about a negative first experience also feels like airing dirty laundry, which is not good for the company either.

I'll be messing with MM when I have some blocks of time. Input welcome. Hopefully I'll find a tweak that makes it friendly to my entire music collection.

Last time I wanted to listen to music, I admit I just used VLC on an Android phone connected to a Windows network folder. And while it occasionally paused a little to get to a folder list, what I liked about it was that it was so foolproof. All the songs were there. All the artists were there. All the songs were playable. Whether VLC was reading my metadata or getting it online, the disc photos appeared. It just worked.

I already spent a lot of time ripping CDs (and movies). At this point my preference is going with something that is just easy.

For movies Plex is easy. Fortunately. I don't think that MediaMonkey is even an option for that. I ripped my movies to AV1, which I see as the up-and-coming standard (but already supported for years in hardware by Intel, NVIDIA, etc.). MediaMonkey even with the codec pack doesn't seem to have even H.265 yet. H.264 is more than 20 years old. With the test movie I tried, the subtitles didn't work. But I didn't get MediaMonkey for movies, so I don't really care about that. I can find a way to do movies. (VLC even reads DVD ISOs with menus!)

I just want to thank Lowlander, Peke, and Rob_S for the replies (especially user Rob_S). It's clear that there is a loyal following. I was posting after the double-disappointment of it not recognizing my music the way I had hoped and then my not finding the support I had expected to find.

I am more hopeful now. At the same time, I would love to see a response like, "Yeah, your music does seem to be organized in a way that our software ought to support without asking the user to jump through a bunch of hoops. So we will work on that to make it happen."

Had it worked, I'd already be recommending this to everyone I know. As it is, it's just another piece of software that doesn't do quite what it should out of the box, which means that yeah, I, as a technically-minded user, can certainly figure it out, but I can't suggest it to random people I know because I don't want to be showing up to have to reorganize their media or tweak their settings. With well-organized media, software this mature should have NO PROBLEM recognizing at least 99% of what I have with no further configuration. Period.

In addition to getting so many songs wrong, some albums are missing altogether, and some listed as "????????????????".

The experience just gave me the feeling that far from being easy, I was in for a big marathon of configuration and setup, for reasons that are still unclear. Why doesn't it recognize these songs and albums? Why doesn't Plex? They mess up completely different sets of songs, such that what Plex gets right MM gets wrong, and vice versa, but it's still a large percentage, and I think a pretty simple AI -- really one developed in the 70s, not even 80s -- ought to be able to handle. So it's partly just a, "Hmmm...that's weird" moment for me.

I'll continue to mess with it, but in the meantime I may just use VLC so that I can enjoy my music like I had intended! I think a lot of the music players on Android are just VLC clones that don't work as well as VLC. But MediaMonkey has a nice Windows interface and a nice set of features -- VLC plays DLNA but doesn't serve it up. I'd be very happy if I could find a simple solution not only for me but for people who ask me about setting up their own media library. I hate the answer, "Well, I set up my own media server, but it's probably too complicated for you. Just keep listening to CDs."

You know?

I think this is a perfect niche for MediaMonkey. But it swung and it was a big miss. So I hope it can do better. There is so much AI out there, including that doesn't require a big GPU. Look at Audacity! Via OpenVINO plugins it can recognize dialog in movie audio and create subtitles from them! All for free. That's a level of difficulty magnitudes above what I'm asking of MM here, just to recognize an already tagged and accurately-named song, without doing a bunch of extra configuration.

I know you can do it. Probably not in time for me to get my media stuff ready to go, but maybe soon enough that I can wholeheartedly recommend you to others. I hope so.

It seems like a cool company, headquartered (I think) in Montreal. I do want it to do well.

Thanks!

p.s. As for this forum, I am not even able to link to your own website! That is really bad. I can't quote the error that I get, "You don’t have rights to post image, email or url links that are external to this domain. You can edit https colon slash slash mediamonkey dot com by inserting a space into the URL (e.g. http colon slash slash website) and a moderator can later fix the link." The suggestion does not work. Look, people who bought the software should be able to make the forum posts they need to be able to make. Get the configuration right, guys! I keep editing these posts to try to get your forum software to accept them. I've wasted half an hour on this. It's annoying. I was told "soon you will have all rights," but do you really want to annoy your new users? Why don't people who buy the software have the right to do a normal post on your forum? Silly. Only if I hang around here on the forum for awhile do I get the right to post what I need to be able to? You have to re-edit the links as well. Some of what it complains about are not even links! When you try to funnel users toward your forum, make it work.

[Lowlander]

CD's are easier to lookup as they have an ID, files on the other hand don't, so lookup often depends on filename and/or tags. MediaMonkey supports audio fingerprinting for better results, this is used with Auto-Tag.

Once you've posted enough you can include links without problems, but as a new users you're blocked for spam reasons.

MediaMonkey should read tags, then auto-guess from filename by default. As Plex also has issues there may be problems with your file tags. However we can only speculate without sample file(s) having issues on scanning.