Don’t know about Media Monkey?
It has been brought to my attention that some of you people don’t know about media monkey.
Media Monkey is a FREE (yes I said free) application that is a media centre type thing. It allows you to do many things play music, sync to your iPod (avoiding the dreaded ITunes) and organise your files. I use it for the last option.
Why is it so good?
The reason why I like it so is it’s flexibility, it allows me to do many things in many ways.
A bit of geeky information for those of you who don’t know about mp3 files:
Mp3 files contain something called a tag this is used by most media players to display things like artist, title and Genre. This is why when you get a file and it’s called play_me_cos_I’m_great.mp3 but when you actually put it on your iPod (other media players are available) and play it you see that the artist is Abba and the title is Dancing queen.
So back to media monkey:
It’s a good idea to keep your tags lined up with your filenames and media monkey is the shiznit for this.
It allows me to write the data into the mp3 tag from the filename (specifying the format). Sometimes someone will give me a file with no tag information and I import the filename information into the tag.
Media monkey also allows you to Auto Tag your file(s) from Amazon so if you have ripped an album from your collection and the tags are all wrong you can point it at the amazon page for that album and it’ll download the details into your tag!
Media monkey also allows you to name your files according to the tag, this means it renames your files into the format you specify and it keeps it all nice and consistent.
The thing that a lot of people have found really useful about media money is album art. I tend to rip my albums with windows media player (if you pay for media monkey you can rip with that, but why pay when media player does it for free?) the only issue with media player is that it creates an album art thumbnail file in the same folder. This is all good when you use media player to playback the file, it’ll look up the album art and display it. But totally a bag of shit when you move it onto your ipod. When you suck your data from the Amazon website Media Monkey allows you to embed the album art into the file (the way it should be) and therefore the album art will always be displayed no matter where you take the while and no matter what you play it on.
Other little niceties are scripts like auto increment track numbers (which allows me to convert my double albums into continuous track numbers) and also case checker which capitalises the right parts of the file name for me 
The media monkey music player is a bit poo, but in the options you can point it at winamp which is my preferred music player so I’m cool with that. If you don’t know about winamp then where have you been?
Winamp has to be the most widespread music player on the planet, again it’s FREE yup that’s right free! It has been around a while now so the interface is pretty solid. There is a million and one different skins for it (celebrities, games, animals, logos, hardware) so whatever you are into it is very likely that you can find one for it. And if not you can make your own because I think there is an application you can download for making winamp skins
For me I like the fact that I can put it in mini mode and “always ontop” which means I can work but always see what’s playing and pause or fast forward with a single click.
Anyway back to media monkey, the only problem is if you are anything like me, once you start it can quickly start controlling your life sometimes I lose whole evenings and sometimes whole weekends sorting out music. The killer is compilation albums with remixes these are almost always wrong when media monkey sucks them down from Amazon and require some jiggery pokery to make the data the way I want it.
However having said that, now I have media monkey’d most of my music I can quickly find whatever I am looking for, so even though I haven’t gained back all the time I put into organising the files it was soo worth it
You can get media monkey at: http://www.mediamonkey.com/
And winamp at: http://www.winamp.com/
P.S. If you are from Media Monkey and are reading this and you think, I deserve a little slice for bigging your app up feel free to contact me
I’ve been using MediaMonkey for years and it is great! It does rip mp3 files from CDs. After 30 days it will tell you it can’t anymore, but if you replace the lame encoder dll file then you’ve got another 30 days. Just keep doing that and you can use MM to rip as much as you want. I did just recently buy a license for MM to see what some of the other goodies were (library filtering is nice!) but the free version is all you need to start converting those CDs to digital.
Thanks for the comment!
Yeah media monkey is the dogs danglies.. I’ll have to try that lame encoder thing if I ever get round to ripping my CD’s to MP3 (which I REALLY need to start doing).
I do have a question though, what do you do about compilation CD’s, do you use the Disk/Track part of the Tag or do you go old school and number the second CD following on from the first?
And what about Artist and album artist do you use them both in this case?
I just add the disc number to the album name. “Name of Album: Disc 1″ “Name of Album: Disc 2″. Something like that. I have my files organized by Artist – Album, so this separates things out better for me.
I just leave the track numbers the way they are. I never use album artist, just artist. It always seemed kind of redundant to me.
Wow that’s really interesting, I suppose everyone thinks everyone else works the same way they do.
I have all the files in one folder with sequential track numbers regardless of disc number (it seems to match the way it comes from Amazon when I do auto tag from web).
I have my files organised simularly but I use Album Artist\Album that way the artist albums have the same Artist and Album Artist but my compilations have the correct Artist but have the Album Artist as “Various Artists” that way compilations are stored together rather than one file in each folder (I call it the shitty ITunes way!)
For major labels I create a new artist for them i.e I have a Ministry of Sound album Artist as I have at least 10 M.O.S albums.
I find this way efficient because my file system is quick and easy to navigate (because sometimes I just want to find the files to copy them) but also the artist is still correct when I put it on my IPod (other digital music players are available!)
I presume you have already utilised the Tools->Scripts functions like Auto increment track #s, Case Checker and Swap Album and Artist when I found these they made my life sooooo much easier!
What about filenaming and featured artists? How do you handle different remixes and featured artists?
well i like the small footprint.. but dang even adding new albums is a pain.. sort of ready to kick it to the shore . have had to reinstall it more than once to reset a new album boring
Sorry to hear about your troubles, haven’t met anyone else who is feeling your pain though. I haven’t had to re-install it once and adding an album is a matter of browsing to the files and adding them is it not? Or do you mean ripping albums?
However I’m all for trying out something new if it has the power of media monkey and I can still get it on a free.