Leaving iTunes Behind - Moving To MediaMonkey And Lossless Music
I love it when I read a post that makes me decide to do something totally differently. CyberNetNews are doing a series of daily giveaways of useful software, and yesterday they were giving away three copies of MediaMonkey Gold the reknowned music player.
I don’t know what possessed me to read the story, as I thought I was happy with iTunes, but when Ryan started that MediaMonkey provided full iPod support I had to check it out. I’m glad I did, as not only has MediaMonkey helped me to finally break free from Apple’s iTunes/iPod stranglehold, it’s also provided to the solution to the problems I was having building a lossless music collection.
I have a very big music collection of around 20k tracks that I’ve accumulated over the years. Although at home I listen to these via my Vista Media Centers, I was still using iTunes to manage my playlists and my iPods. The problem this was creating was that now that I have tonnes of storage available on my home server, I want to re-import my CDs in a lossless format, but if I use the format available within iTunes I won’t be able to play my files on my Media Centers (I did manage to find a way to play the files but without the metadata which was a waste of time).
The beauty of MediaMonkey is that it provides support for both ripping and tagging various lossless formats such as WAV, FLAC and APE. FLAC in particular is an open format, so I’ve chosen it as my lossless format as it provides the greatest compatibility. Although FLAC isn’t supported by MCE out of the box, it only took one search to find a way to play FLAC in Windows Media Center. Much better than the hours I’d spent trying to play AAC files in MCE……
I think Apple should hang their heads in shame after looking at the iPod sync options available in MediaMonkey. Not only can you control easily what parts of your library are synchronised e.g. albums, artists etc, but you have full control over how much is synced. The most important option for me though are the conversion rules that can be created. If I were to sync all my lossless files, even with 160GB on my iPod Classic I wouldn’t get far. With MediaMonkey I can create rules so that when big filed are sync’d, they are converted on the fly to a smaller format, so that they can all fit onto the device. Brilliant!
What was even better with the move away from iTunes was the ease with which it was done. All I add to do was scan my music directory, and MediaMonkey added my info. Because my music was so well tagged, nearly all my iTunes library info was available. The info that was missing e.g. playcounts was added at the second pass automatically by MediaMonkey using a very cool wizard (an option was available for WMP in addition to iTunes).
There are so many options available in MediaMonkey I’m going to enjoy managing my music collection again. The interface is so much quicker to use, and I love the inbuilt tagging tools and album art import. It’s also considerably faster than iTunes - when you have 20k files iTunes is a real drag to use. I can’t wait to have fun creating new playlists faster, listening to my new lossless music tracks and also messing around with MediaMonkey plugins.
V3 of MediaMonkey is out soon and I really can’t wait!
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Comment by Kirsty on 25 April 2008:
A have recently downloaded midea monkey and am unsure of how to imort my music off my existing i tunes can some one please help ? ?
Comment by McDave on 18 January 2008:
@MichaelQ
Not sure about Mac compatibility for the SmartMedia Server but check out the new Time Capsule from Apple. It works with both Macs & PCs, time machine backup, centralised storage. If you get a full .mac account all the web-sharing and multi-system syncing is a breeze. iTunes and iPhoto allow wi-fi sharing and streaming for when friends visit and my AppleTV’s the best HiFi I’ve ever had and it’s all zero-config. A bit more practical than trying to emulate an office server environment in the home.
McD
Comment by Everton on 17 January 2008:
@MichaelQ
2 - good! It means easy
3- just answered elsewhere
Comment by MichaelQ on 16 January 2008:
@Everton
1. Thanks for the response; that was very informative.
2. doddle? (sorry, I’m from Texas) Is that good or bad?
3. Perhaps this may be a silly question, but:
Can you put a Mac on a WHS network? Would you get all the advantages? (i.e. shared folders, streaming, back up [with Time Machine], etc?
Ok, here’s the thing. I’m thinking about getting a HP MediaSmart and a MacBook Pro.
I want to put all my music on the server then use MM on a MacBook Pro (through Parallels or whatever).
Would this work? How would you set this up? Alternative ideas?
Thanks for any help!
Comment by Everton on 16 January 2008:
@Michael
Setting up the WHS is a doddle (I have one which I love). You just point MM to the music folder on the WHS in the same way as you would on a PC. Sharing playlists is a bit of a pain as you have to run a script (built into MM so not so bad) to export them to a directory so that other apps like WM, MCE etc can see them. There may be a better way but I haven’t found it.
Comment by Michael on 16 January 2008:
Great post.
I’ve been mediamonkey for a couple years now and I love it. I’ve recently been thinking about buying a windows home server (HP MediaSmart in particular) and I’m wondering how difficult it would be to set it up to serve all of my music. Any help?
Thanks!
Comment by NachoNYC on 27 December 2007:
After being an Apple disciple for many years, I just test-drove Mediamonkey and I’m keeping it for good. It’s low on Vista resources, massive amount of tagging options, 2x rating options, Flac Support!!, skins, minilyrics support, it’s a KEEPER. Highly recommended from a music fan.