Balaji’s Blog

iTunes for the rest of us

If you have decided to stay away from the cult of the iPod (like I have), your biggest headache typically is getting your songs onto the player.

That’s not to say that the software supplied with your player doesn’t work, but I suppose you could say a monocycle works as well.. in a fashion

The usual complaints?

• A horrible interface that makes it almost impossible to do anything but just view songs.
• No additional functionality that might make it easier for you to add metadata to your collection – for example, freedb lookup
• No functionality to find duplicates or missing tracks, or volume-level your collection
• Poorly implemented playlist functionality
• No podcasting support

All of which those fancy iPod users get in one shiny package thanks to iTunes¹. So what do us poor cousins do?

Well you could try MediaMonkey. What do I love about it?

• Superb functionality for tagging and organizing your songs – I managed to add artist, track, year and album art to my entire collection of some 2000+ songs in one afternoon – how freaking amazing is that?
• Really once you have everything properly organized, everything else just falls into place – for example, finding duplicates. MM does volume leveling, both run-time and permanent
• MM can use Winamp as its player plus most plugins that work with Winamp work with MM also.
• It can create smart playlists. The pro version allows for more advanced smart playlists, but the basic functionality exists even if you don’t go pro
• Out of the box, MM supports pretty much every type of MP3 player out there – Creative and/or any Playsforsure device, iRiver, iPod and the USB drive MP3 players. If you have an older player, you might still be able to transfer songs, but not playlists. YMMV.
• The only downside so far – it doesn’t do podcasts².

The best part of all this – MediaMonkey is free. Yup, no time limited trial, no spyware, no pop-ups. All that functionality I’ve just talked about is available for anyone who downloads the standard version. Awesome!

It might not have the visual appeal of iTunes, but MM gets the job done, and it does it well. And suddenly, joining the “i ain’t no white earbuds slave” movement just got simpler.

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1. Why other MP3 player manufacturers don’t get this point is something I’ll discuss in another post [↩]
2. though the next version of MM will, and there is a plugin available in the forums that adds podcasting support [↩]

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.