A look at the interface might confuse some users as it is packed with many buttons and functions. It can be divided into three parts. The menu toolbar, a sidebar that switches between different display modes and the main window that is divided in two rows as well.

The left sidebar contains the following modes:

• Simple Mode: Contains a listing of all music tracks as well as suggestions on the top which are computed after time.Suggestions include preferred, newest, rarely listen, other albums and similar artists.
• Files: A file browser that displays a directory tree with all music directories that have been added to the software. Filters, covers and a queue to create playlists are provided here as well.
• Tracks: Tracks sorted by genre using their mp3 tags. Filters, covers and the queue are offered in this menu as well.
• Albums: Displays either an album catalog that displays the album art or a albums table. The thumbnail size of the cover can be changed on the fly.
• Playlists: Contains an overview of all playlists on the system. Playlists are divided into new, best of, novelties and bookmarks. Again with options to save playlists.
• Display: Display the cover, lyrics and an animation while playing music. Covers and lyrics are automatically loaded from the Internet.
• Information: Displays information about the current band on Wikipedia.
• Config: Dozens of settings.
• Stats: Displays tracks per monht, size by directory, collection size by month and the genres

The software is packed with additional features that are interesting. It contains a so called DJ mode which makes it easy to create playlists based on factors like proportions (e.g. 20% heavy metal, 30% rock), transitions (Heavy –> Pop) or ambience (Party, Soft).

Additional features of interest:

• Mp3 tag editor (Ogg,ID3 V1/V2, WMA, Flac), Online (CDDB) retagging
• Finding duplicate files
• Configuration of web radios
• Last.fm information queries, scrobble
• CD Scanner
• Keyboard controls
• Alarm clock

Jajuk is an interesting alternative to music management programs like Media Monkey or iTunes.

I started off with Windows Media Player 11 and iTunes. However in my review of iTunes I admitted I personally didn’t use it for myself. I decided after posting that, that it would be a good idea to test it out properly for myself, so I downloaded iTunes 7.7.

After playing around with it I came the conclusion that while it’s good if you have an iPod Nano and not a lot of music, its pretty dodgy for any large music libraries and the tagging is hit and miss. Performance on Windows is also pretty shocking, even worse then WMP but I did like the simple and clear interface.

One of the best things about iTunes is that there are a large number of extensions, plugins and addons which can provide some great extra functionality. Aside from that I certainly wasn’t converted.

Media Monkey

Today I decided to cover MediaMonkey, the popular music tagging solution and management software. It’s available in a free and ‘gold version. The free version has plenty of functionality, although the upgrade is good as well.

Media Monkey is the best music file tagger, hands down. If I’m wrong about that, then let me know because I’d love to see what your alternative is. Although I use Media Monkey for all my music tagging, it’s not my favourite player for general music browsing and playing.

It has a lot of great features, but I find the interface extremely unintuitive and takes too much mucking around to get it working to my satisfaction, including finding new themes. Performance however is fantastic, the best out of all the media players I’ve used. It handled my 10 000 track library with ease.

It also has the biggest feature list, overwhelmingly so in fact. The more you use Media Monkey the more about it you’ll discover, in fact I would say it has quite a learning curve compared to other software, although you’ll appreciate it as you find more and more features.

Extensions are available through Scripts. This provides the ability to add some great functions to Media Monkey, but it’s also not the easiest for new users. There is no one directory of scripts, instead you’ll have to Google or scour the official forums. It would be nice to see a Firefox addons style directory added to Media Monkey’s webpage.

For me personally, the interface is what lets it down. I’d love to see the next release focus on this above all else. When compared to WinAmp, iTunes, WMP and even Songbird Media Monkey really feels quite ‘clunky’ and unintuitive, great though the software is.

To conclude, if you need one piece of software to completely organise your music, Media Monkey is the application to do it.

What are your opinions?

Apple’s iTunes does it almost. You can select an option in iTunes to download album art of all selected songs using the iTunes store. That downloads lots of artwork, the main problem however is that this artwork is not added to the mp3 file directly but to a database only. If you use another application like Windows Media Player or XBMC the artwork will not be displayed. That’s a big issue if you transfer the music to computers without iTunes.

That means that I won’t be using iTunes to add album art to my mp3 collection. The best way that I discovered is to use Media Monkey. It’s semi-automatic. You select all mp3s of an album, right-click the selection and select Auto Tag From Web or press CTRL + L instead.

It can take some time if you have a large collection of mp3 files but it is definitely worth it. The process does not only add album art to the mp3 collection but also tags the files properly. It takes about 10 seconds per album.

I sorted my collection by album in Media Monkey at the beginning and began to work the mp3 collection from top to bottom selecting all songs of an album each time.

Update: Media Monkey is available as a free and commercial software program for the Windows operating system. The developers have recently released version 4 of the music software.

Other options include the Album Art Downloader or the Automatic Album Cover Tool to add cover art to mp3 files.