Given the somewhat comical name, we thought MediaMonkey would be a lesser version of the far too popular iTunes. We took this weekend to play around with MediaMonkey Gold, and as it turns out, the program is a more potent and promising music management program than what might be conceived on first impression.
First impressions
The main window welcomes you with a tip-of-the-day pop-up so common these days. Although we prefer to explore the features heads-on, you can understand the use of such pop-ups for less experienced users.
First of all, you’re prompted to add music files to the library. Then you find your songs in the hierarchical browser tree to the left, neatly classified according to artist, album, composer and so on. But also according to location, which is great if you’ve spread out your collection on both computer and network and try to find out where specific songs are located. Upon import, you can even choose to let the program ignore duplicate files which as you know may sneak into your library from time to time. Note well that the files in the browser tree is Windows Explorer based therefore cutting, copying, pasting or deleting a file will affect the original file wherever it’s stored.
Since I have most of my songs stored on a network I tried to add the music folder present on our NAS. However, for some reason it was filed under Network>Microsoft Windows Network>”Workgroup”>NAS, which seems odd since the NAS usually shows up directly under Network in all other instances both from within Media Monkey and other programs. Roughly 20 GBs worth of music was imported over wireless network without a problem though.
Music browsing & playback
Playing tracks is pretty much straight forward. You either double-click on your song of choice or press play in the top menu bar or the larger one located in the player-specific area at the bottom. When changing tracks, a 1-sec fade-out-fade-in is default which is great when listening to a random fray of music. There are some instances when you don’t want it on and there are ways of customizing this. More about that in a minute.
The search feature is as rich and potent as the one in iTunes. Typing artist, track, year, bpm, genre etc. generates relevant hits blazing fast (over wireless network none-the-less). Search history is found in a separate branch of the browser tree. There’s even a possibility to search for songs on Wikipedia, CD-databases and on Amazon.com.
The equalizer function feels rather make-shift because there are only 6 presets that are loaded through Windows Explorer. However importing or exporting equalizer settings is not a back-breaking process either.
When using MediaMonkey Gold’s built-in theme, the transparent player-specific controls mentioned before seem to blend in to the otherwise gray background. This makes it hard to see clearly on glossy screens in high ambient light conditions i.e. sunlight. Once you learn where the buttons are located though, it should pose no problem. Another option is choosing another skin altogether.
There are four different view options for browsing music. Either you see all tracks in your library as a simple list; with album art, or with album art with details about the tracks of each album. Lastly a drop-down track-browser is a welcome feature that compliments the aforementioned three options. However all of these modes are available in iTunes as well apart from the iTunes exclusive cover-flow feature; a visual way of “flicking” through albums that I see as style rather than substance anyway.
Editing track details is a sea of options compared to iTunes. You can add detailed information about lyricist, involved people, ISRC, publisher etc. but also on “mood” or “occasion” this song is played. This allows you to specify how MediaMonkey behaves when playing songs classified in for example “holiday” or “kid’s music”. The fade-out-fade-in feature can be omitted for instance, repeat patterns can be specified and so on in the tools menu. These features are mostly for professional (or geeky) music collectors as most other programs will not recognize these extra ID3 tags (iTunes included).
A welcome feature is to add lyrics to tracks. It is found in iTunes as well but not as the separate tab found in MediaMonkey. A karaoke function would have been even more than welcome, justifying why you’d fill in lyrics on each and every song.
MediaMonkey does come with a visualization feature just like any other music player. It’s the standard psychedelic trip to the beat with 2 standard versions and the ability to add more. We prefer the Windows Media Player visualizations because they’re simply cooler and more to choose from. However, a great feature which we sadly didn’t test is the activation of 3D for the visualizations! Using a pair 2-color 3D-glasses, you’re able to specify stereo view and glass color so as to make the visualizations stand out in 3D (with the loss of the color sight you had previously :P)!
After managing all files with iTunes prior to MediaMonkey Gold, it is hard to say what the program itself has added to the files in terms of album art, classifications etc. since MediaMonkey can actually extract all of this from iTunes itself (or other popular music players). Even the ratings and play count is preserved, something we have struggled with in the past when migrating libraries to new computers.
Ripping music CDs are no problem as with any decent music player. You can adjust a ton of music quality options, destination folder etc. Unclear whether CD-info is collected from Gracenote but the ID3 tags are auto-filled in any case. Burning of CDs is limited to music in library, just like in iTunes. This feature does what it advertised. Nothing to complain about here.
One of iTunes greatest successes is the iTunes store. Apple’s own music, e-book and app store for both iOS devices and computers alike. MediaMonkey has a more crippled feature in comparison. You can make in-app purchases of music from Amazon.com thus supporting Media Monkey developers in the process, which on the other hand sounds nice!
In Windows 7, hovering the pointer above active programs in the program bar gives you program-specific controls. In MediaMonkey’s case you’ll get play, pause, stop, next, previous buttons along with album art displayed with each new start of a track. The same feature is available for iTunes though, but it’s a plus that it’s there!
MediaMonkey’s strengths
Right-clicking a track currently playing and choosing “send to” gives you many options. For example you can change the location of the file without disrupting the music playing. However, for some reason all folders are not accessible through this menu. We tried moving a file within the “Music” folder on our local computer to another folder within “Music”. Though, only one other folder showed up (“iTunes”) even though the target folder was “Sample Music” residing in the “Music” folder. Strange…
“Send to” also gives you the option of sending a track or a bunch of tracks to an external device. This is also found as an individual button in the menu bar up top. We were able to send a unique music file over to an iPod Classic (80GB) that is already synced with another iTunes library without any problems. MediaMonkey simply accessed the iPod database and inserted the song; fully search-able in the on-board OS. This is exciting news for those looking for an alternative to iTunes’s sleek but slow and somewhat limited UI. This also works with other iPods, iPhones, MP3 players and the like which is one of Media Monkey’s strengths.
Along with fast start-up times, quick browsing → even to a NAS via wireless network connection, Media Monkey sure brings a lot to the table when competing with iTunes.
Netradio and Podcasts functions are sad to say lacking in that they seem to be localized to the U.S. market. However, if you know the URL you can easily add a podcasts subscription. Netradio has always been a bit trickier to set up but we honestly don’t know of anyone that seriously listen to it either so we’ll let that one pass.
Adding playlists is pretty straight forward. As soon as you start playing a track a “Now playing” list is generated and accessible in the right docked window. You can add songs to the top or bottom of the list by clicking corresponding buttons in the menu bar or simply choose to create your own playlist to come back to later. In MediaMonkey Gold there’s also an auto-playlist feature that much like “smart playlists” in iTunes which create lists according to set criteria. These lists can also be transferred to external devices. Great for sending subsets of music to your portable music player.
The virtual CD function of MediaMonkey Gold gives you the opportunity to catalog all of your CDs but only ripping selected songs to your computer. You can be super organized and find songs, albums, info on artists etc. about all your CDs without eating away too much space on your computer. Perfect feature for the geek once again!
An awesome feature of MediaMonkey Gold is the Sleep Timer. It plays music that gradually fades over time until your computer shuts down. Ideal when you want to fall asleep to the sound of music! However, the Windows log off jingle is not muted and this feature would have been double great if it could wake your computer and start playing music as an alarm clock too…
Taking a look in the File menu we find the usual “open file or URLs to play”, “add to/rescan library” or wipe out your library entirely. I didn’t find anywhere you could exclude a single folder from your library which would be useful if your were to collect all music into one place. Just like in iTunes, there’s a auto-move-and-copy option that copies all your music to one location. This is our preferred method of music organizing since we put it on our NAS where music is accessible across the network and redundant meaning no loss in the case of hard drive failure.
In the view menu, there’s a “Party Mode” that we really like. It puts the Media Monkey Gold player in full-screen view and only shows player-associated buttons. This is particularly useful when you want your guests to be able to add music to the play lists without changing anything in your music library. Also, Party Mode can be password protected so that no one can access other programs or folders on your computer. Simply genius. All music programs should have this feature! Something we’ve been missing in music players though is an auto-DJ function that instead of bluntly changing from a song to the next use BPM matching and cross-fading to switch track without dropping the beat.
Party mode
The closest thing both Media Monkey Gold and iTunes come to this is their DJ-function that automatically adds tracks to a playlist before the list ends…
The Tools menu lets you auto-fill ID3 tags but also automate stuff using scripts (if you know how to write scrips) or add 3rd party extensions to Media Monkey. Perhaps a future DJ-function as mentioned above may be installed this way?
If there are plugins from Winamp that you miss you can change the in-program music player to Winamp and be able to use your plugins seamlessly. The possibilities are almost limitless.
Media Monkey is even able to play music bought in the iTunes music store. To be able to listen to such as song prior to Apple setting licenses free meant “authorizing” an iTunes account to be able to play the music. We don’t know if Media Monkey actually overrides anything but it has been able to play all of our bought music without problem.
Closing remarks
Media Monkey Gold works at great speed and offers great flexibility. Can do almost anything. Despite the name of Media Monkey, it near-exclusively handles audio files so not for those of you wanting to push videos and photos to your iPods etc.
Though not as visually stunning as iTunes, the UI comes out clean and it doesn’t take long to understand what all parts are for. Great party-feature, iPod manager and overall music organizer. What it does it does well!
Missed feature; when searching the entire library for a song and starts playing it, clearing the search field doesn’t mean that a new song is played when the first one is finished like in iTunes. Instead you’ll have to manually set it to play a new song from the library. Hope this can be fixed.
This review was based on Media Monkey Gold version 3.2.4.1304. To find out more about this program, visit: Media Monkey
