MediaMonkey - The Best ‘Sound of Music’ for Windows

Overview

Let there be light and there was light. Let there be sound and there were music players. In quest of searching the best music player in Windows, I had to look into every minute detail of their features because they are almost similar in comparison. Windows Media Player, Jet Audio Player, Media Monkey and Winamp were the ones I tested this time.

To come up with a specific target one needs to go through different levels. I did so too to present to you an honest and deep review of these softwares. On the way, we lost two friends of ours, Windows Media Player and Jet Audio player because they were certainly not worth participating in the race for the best. Windows Media Player with its age old presets and EQs and only SRS WOW effects couldn’t but fail.Though Jet Audio had a lot of options, still it wasn’t the product I was expecting. So I had Winamp and Media Monkey to go for the final show.

Features

Feature wise its very difficult to distinguish between the two, because both of them have almost similar in facilities. Still here are some points which differentiates them:

• Media Library

  Media Library is a vital part of an audio player. Every Music lovers knows that keeping track of every single music file inside the computer is a herculean task. Winamp has perhaps the best Media Library option. It at once searches for all the music files and displays them to your media library with tracks. A tracker is very important for those who move music files from one folder to another. Without these the library would be nothing but a home of broken links. Media Monkey media library is fairly decent but not as efficient as Winamp and also cannot keep track on music which is moved from its original location.

  Then again, Media Monkey betters Winamp in displaying path names and locations to a song in the library which is very essential. Let’s say if I want to find a song of Madonna, I will search the library with Madonna and voila! here are the exact locations where she is waiting like a prayer answered.

• Encoding

  Encoding different music file formats is another thing that you use very much. Though there is not much of a difference, still Media Monkey wins brownie points here because its enriched with the highest capabilities and lets you convert audio files from almost any audio format to OGG, MP3, WMA, or WAV files, and preserve tag information when converting from OGG, MP3, WMA, WAV, APE, FLAC or MPC.

• Tagging

  Tagging is the part where Media Monkey runs miles ahead from others, even from Winamp. It does this as good as a professional software like Tag&Rename or MP3 Tag Tool and that too for free. It even surpasses Tag&Rename by adding multiple album art images to each track, and add more details to each track than you can in Tag&Rename. This is a wonderful feature to have, isn’t it?

• Volume & Equalizer

  Here comes the most awaited part of the review. The volume and equalizers are almost of the same standard for both Winamp and Media Monkey. But then again, the old problem of Winamp, that it cracks on high-pitched shrill music isn’t something they have overcome fully. Media Monkey has two outstanding features in this segment:

  1. Auto Volume Leveling : This option makes sure that the volume is leveled and kept uniform for the listeners so that you don’t have to adjust volumes every time there is a change of song. Let’s say from Denver to Metallica!
  2. Auto-DJ Option : The auto-dj option is another cool thing to have. Suppose Media monkey has run out of your selected songs, it will still play something or the other. So if you are music lover, you can listen to non-stop music without thinking much about making play-lists and stuff.

• Online Audio

  Winamp gets an upper edge here as you can go to AOL music store, purchase and play music in Winamp from a range of almost 2 Million songs! It even lets you watch TV episodes and all. But Media Monkey is by no means lagging behind. With its newest NetRadio feature you can stream music and listen to songs, and even has an inbuilt browser which connects to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, CD Universe, PlayCentric etc.

• Plug-ins

  When we have it all, why shouldn’t we be greedy for more? Though I am afraid, my vote still goes to the likeliest combination of Audio player and Audio DSP plug-in of my generation and that is Winamp with DFX. I hope Media Monkey has a reply to that soon.

Verdict

With all said and done, the verdict is clear. Go for Media Monkey because you aren’t going to get so many features in a software for now at-least. Winamp, for me, will never fall far behind but its Media Monkey time folks. Make music yours with the absolute best. Happy Listening.