MediaMonkey review

MediaMonkey seems to be a great alternative when it comes to replace Winamp or another audio player. It needs approximately the same amount of memory to be installed and it seems like it isn’t so RAM hungry as Winamp is. On top of the fact that it costs THE SAME as Winamp does ($19.95) i dare to say, after more than 8 years of Winamp usage that this neat player might be a serious competitor. The support is great as they have a wonderful community back at the forums.

A nice library is always at hand if you need it and helps you manage your music files even if you have a small collection or even a huge one of 50.000+ audio files as it offers you the possiblity of sorting the files and finding the desired tunes in a snap.

If you own a portable player of any kind MediaMonkey is the perfect audio player for syncronizing your tunes. It’s currently supporting iPod, iPod Shuffle, iPod mini, iPod Nano, iPod Video, iRiver H120, H320, H340 and almost any USB Mass Storage Devices. You can syncronize informations like album arts, ratings, volume leveling, play history and of course playlists.

On top of that, this awesome player also has support for ripping CDs using encoders like OGG, LAME MP3, WMA and FLAC. Of course it has a format convertor too which lets you convert from almost any format known to OGG, MP3, WMA, or WAV. However if you wish to convert from other formats check out the available input plugins.

MediaMonkey also has an MP3 Tag editor which is practically an ID3 tag editor which supports ID3v1 & and ID3v2, an OGG tag editor which also supports FLAC files, a WMA tag editor, an APE2 tag editor which is of course for APE files and even an WAV tag editor.

Did i told you MediaMonkey is great for organizing your music collection ? Of course i did, but guess what ? this player helps you do more than that: it helps you store your files into well structured folders rather than all over the hdd and renames the files you want according to their artist, track number, album, etc.

Obviously this player also knows how to ease your pain when you try to create playlists, which of course you might want to export later to m3u files. If i got into playlists i can’t go any further without mentioning the fact that you can use MediaMonkey to manage your library or playlist and use Winamp as your player. This is a built-in feature of which you can see a picture somewhere at the end of this review. I think this more than cool, the freedom of choice.

This jukebox-like player is the perfect solution for you if you throw a party and care to play your tunes from the PC. The “party” module helps set a password for your player just to make sure and protects your library and playlist from being modified. The “auto-dj” module also helps you by automatically playing tunes when your manually selected tracks run out so you can sit back and relax without worrying that the music will eventualy stop.

You don’t have to worry about the fact that some audio files have different volume levels because the MediaMonkey uses Replay Gain and MP3 Gain technology which will do the volume adjusting for you. It’s not a secret that a 10 band equalizer is available and some dsp plugins as well.

A rarely encountered module is the Statistics generator that helps you gather information about your library activity and status which you then can export to excel, html, or xml files if you want to share them with others.

I can’t belive i almost forgot to remind the “Disc Burning Wizzard” that helps you create MP3 discs, audio CDs and other media formats. MediaMonkey also suports scripts that can substantially extend it’s list of features and help you customize your experience.

I think the above features and the other ones i didn’t mentioned should make MediaMonkey a highly regarded audio player. I greatly appreciate the dynamics of the interface (here’s to be mentioned the skins support), the user friendliness and the reliable DirectSound output plugin that is most than perfect not only because it resembles with Winamp’s DirectSound plugin but has a nice GUI with all the needed options.

Download MediaMonkey Standard or purchase the Gold edition.

You ought to try this great player as it’s one of the best i’ve tested in a while. Below there are some pictures with the main characteristics, just to help you make an impression.