Complete Music Player Review (Part 3)
For Part 3 I’m going to do the unthinkable… review a commercial application! So apologies for that, but I think this is worthy of a mention, even if you do have to pay for it.
Update: Helium Music Manager is available as a free and premium version nowadays. The free version is somewhat limited in comparison, for instance when it comes to the mass downloading of album art and information, repairing mp3 and flac audio files, but also display-wise. A full feature comparison is available on this page.
Helium Music Manager
Are you the sort of person who likes to keep every piece of mp3 meta data correct? You have album art for every song in your music library and spend hours keeping your favourite artists’ Wikipedia entry up-to-the-minute?
Well it’s a shame then that many music jukebox applications don’t provide the functionality for people like you. If you’ve ever wanted to be able to browse your library by genre, sub genre, sub-sub-sub genre, music label and city of origin then I have found something in which you can do it.
Helium Music Manager provides a way to actually use every piece of data you have on an artist. You can have biographies, lyrics for every song, associated artists, see which bands individual musicians have been in and much more. Everything is analysed and collected into graphs and statistics, so you can see how much of your library was produced by EMI during the year 1970 if you so wished.
The biggest problem with Helium is just that it takes a lot of time to get your collection organized… there is no ‘batch tag’ option and for every artist you will need to go through and individually download and save data, lyrics, details, biography, reviews etc. However if you don’t mind that, or purchasing it, then I would defiantly recommend this as a music organiser alternative.
Conclusion, if you’re obsessed with your music this will let your organise it totally, however it’s not the most intuitive application at all and may cause some frustration for a lot of users.
It’s definetly powerful… however I got turned off a bit by the learning curve… I wish some of its features where added to other programs… such as linking of all meta data… so you can see what a particular label released in a certain year, see all the songs by a certain composer and so on.
Been using Helium for about three years. IMHO it is by far the best music app, and blows all other apps out of the water with its easy handling of mass tagging. It can be quite complex, but that is only becuase it is so powerful.
AAAA+++++++++