Ten years ago, I was sharing a cubicle with my pal Keith. We were both nerds, very into music, and ready to compare notes on music and the software we used to enjoy it. I was into the "less is more" school of thought, so I loved Winamp for listening to music and making playlists of songs for different moods. I used another program to "rip" or extract audio from CDs, called Audiograbber. (Still around, I see.) I liked both because they easily and effectively did exactly what I wanted them to do.
Keith, on the other hand, had studied user interfaces for a living for a few years. He was not intimidated by menus and preferred options and preferences to presets. He was using a program called MusicMatch Jukebox to not only play his music, but to tag his MP3s, rip CDs, normalize volume across songs, and much more. Needless to say, since it was free, I was an immediate convert, even purchasing the "lifetime upgrade" option a few years later.
It really was sweet software - you could edit the MP3 tags on one song or a batch at a time. You could get the basics from the file name or MM would search Gracenote (music tag database, previously called CDDB) for the closest match. If you got songs in some odd format but your portable player only accepted MP3, you could convert them in MM very easily. For any kind of encoding (ripping, converting), you could always set the parameters for the finished product. Then Yahoo! bought MusicMatch.
Like Lala.com, there was an overture by the purchasing company to bring MM customers aboard the Yahoo! Music service. I didn't want recommendations from the record companies. More importantly, the Yahoo! player had almost none of the options I mentioned in the previous paragraph. It was a joke, really, and a double whammy since I realized that the "lifetime upgrades" only lasted a year and a half.
(Then the whole Lala.com to Apple, Inc. thing happened - old wounds opened again, but I digress.)
More recently, I've been looking for similar software to wrangle my ever burgeoning music collection. I want good-quality rips at high bit rates for archive-quality backups. I'd like to be able to even out varying volume levels when burning a CD or listening to my collection. I'd like to have some help with tagging songs I have neglected in the past, and I'm not interested in paying any more monthly/annual/lifetime fees. There are some excellent individual options (EAC for ripping, Songbird or VLC or Foobar2000 for playing) but I liked having one program to do it all.
Media Monkey (MM?!) is pretty much all of that under one roof again. It has done 15+ super-clean album rips and two format conversions for me so far. It uses FreeDB (no charge, unlike Gracenote), has excellent organizational options, and is skinnable. In fact, I found one skin that looks excellent on the television in the living room. Clear and easy to read.
Keith would dig it. (You might, too.)
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