Order of the Bath

I have finally had enough with Windows Media Player messing me about. The issues were

• Even though I operated every available switch to stop it, it continued to contact the internet to get what it thought were better track listings and cover artwork even if I had set them manually.
• When changing tags, you could never actually tell when they would make it into the files. The library database showed the correct information but the song files themselves may not be updated for hours, during which time, WMP had to be left running. Not a lot of use when my Sonos system gets its information directly from the files.

Maybe I was doing something wrong but I couldn’t figure it out. Anyway, now I have stopped using it. After asking around, the consensus was that Media Monkey was the best available, largely because you could customise it (trivially) with skins and (functionally) with scripts. The changeover was clean and painless and all the information loaded into the very fast database with no trouble.

I like a simple interface so off came the baby blue skin and back to windows default styling and all my earlier reservations about it vanished. Once I found my way around the powerful options and commands available I was able to clean the library up properly. The missing features that I wanted, organising classical music by composer and all music by the album artist rather than the track artists were easily added using the Magic-Nodes script. I will post the configuration lines for this another day.

Once version 3 is available, which adds navigation by cover art then I will be fully happy. I have purchased a Gold licence, not so much for the extra features it offers but to support the team developing it.

This entry was posted on 18 Dec 2007 at 15:02 by Rick and is filed under Hi-Fi & Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.