Why shouldn’t a digital download be better, not worse, than a CD release?

Sit in a studio as most of your favorite albums are recorded, mixed, and mastered, and odds are the digital material is being recorded at higher bit depths and sample rates. And while the perceptual record is more mixed, there’s also no question that, in terms of data, lossy compression schemes like MP3 do demand some loss in audio information. (Lossless schemes like FLAC, by contrast, use less data but do so without sacrificing sound information.)

All of this means that it’s news that you can get Radiohead’s “The King of Limbs” album in 24-bit, lossless FLAC. It’s the first time there’s been a major artist doing this kind of release online, say 7Digital – and, in turn, the first step back toward greater fidelity after the step backward from 16-bit, 44.1kHz lossless audio CDs to the lossy versions available now. By “first,” I can only imagine they mean on 7Digital; if you like this sort of release, it’s worth checking out HDtracks, an online store with content all going this direction (and lots of FLAC):
https://www.hdtracks.com/index.php

It’s also the latest case that demonstrates that iTunes need not be your only online store for music. UK rival 7digital is the first and only digital store to offer up the band’s brilliant “The King of Kimbs” in 24-bit FLAC.

http://7digital.com
Deluxe release @ 7digital [US link]

Whether their listeners can really hear the difference or not, it’s likely stores will begin to move to greater audio fidelity. For their part, 7digital says that the 24-bit FLAC codec for Radiohead “is the first step in 7digital’s move towards higher quality digital music downloads.” The reasoning is pretty simple. Bandwidth and storage costs are getting smaller for online stores as those stores grow and better leverage server infrastructure. Storage is generally cheaper now than it had been, too, though somewhat mitigated by the increasing popularity of solid state flash memory over larger, cheaper hard disk drives. But most of all, stores are likely to respond to artist and listener demand, particularly as resellers try to differentiate themselves from streaming sound and justify your purchase. It’s likely labels may also look to formats like FLAC to squeeze more revenue out of the enthusiasts who are most likely to buy full albums. The deluxe FLAC edition – bundled with 16-bit FLAC and 320kbps AAC for compatibility – costs US$11.99 instead of the technically-inferior US$7.92 320kbps MP3 version.

I’m skipping over the most important issue, though – how do you listen to this?

FLAC isn’t the only compressed lossless codec, but it is the only format that’s fully free and open source. It’s really an ideal tradeoff – you maintain smaller file sizes, but the quality of a 24-bit FLAC file is the same as a much bigger 24-bit WAV or AIFF.

It’s hardly a household name, but FLAC support is surprisingly widespread. Streaming players like the Logitech Squeezebox and Sonos products support it.

Many desktop software players will play FLAC, too: once codec support is installed on your OS of choice, in fact, most players will do it. Linux these days does it out of the box with most players. VLC is probably the easiest, sure-fire way to get FLAC support on Windows and Mac. On Windows, the excellent MediaMonkey, Winamp, and foobar2000 all play FLAC natively. On the Mac, the open source Cog is also an option (though it appears it hasn’t been updated recently, sadly). Aside from VLC, cross-platform, open source players like Songbird (Mac, Windows) and Banshee (gradually being ported from Linux to Mac and Windows) are promising, too.

Of course, part of the reason the situation is spotty is that iTunes has gained a certain hegemony. Nothing against iTunes per se, but I believe having choice is a good thing. Indeed, the predecessor of iTunes itself – the long-forgotten SoundJam MP by Casady & Greene on which Apple’s product was based – was the product of a period of heated Mac and Windows player rivalries. If you love music, you’ll want some options.

And the tide is turning. One of the most encouraging audio player initiatives I’ve seen yet is from Audiofile Engineering. I’m already a fan of AE because of their excellent wave editing and loop products (working on a new review – stay tuned). Now, they’re reviving the spirit of SoundJam’s principle rival, and my own player of choice in another life, Audion. Fidelia is a perfect choice of commercial player for Radiohead; it can play FLAC natively and even dither the 24-bit audio stream for a 16-bit output. I haven’t reviewed Fidelia yet as I’d like to see it mature a bit; minimalism is good, but some basic functionality is still emerging. But I do hope to talk about it soon. And while Windows users have had lots of terrific choices, it’s nice to see choice returning to the Mac, too.

http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/fidelia/

Speaking of hegemony, mobile players have tended to lag in FLAC support, but that’s improving, too. The free and open source andless for Android supports FLAC, and I expect more as the Android music player market continues to heat up.

Many of these players do actually also support Apple’s Apple Lossless format – even including many of the free Linux options – so I expect future iTunes lossless exclusives wouldn’t necessarily be a dealbreaker. (That’s true even of andless, so you could, say, rip to Apple Lossless with iTunes and load Apple Lossless and purchased FLAC files onto an Android music player when on the go. Maybe someday we’ll even see DIY devices based on Android that offer high-fidelity audio outputs.)

An obviously-essential part of this equation is whether you can actually hear the results. I won’t start on music consumers who listen regularly on internal laptop speakers and generic Apple white earbuds. But I’d be interested in what you can detect, comparing different music content, using better listening environments. With “deluxe” editions bundling the MP3 and FLAC together, we’ll have lots of raw material for double-blind tests. Anyone with some experience in administering such tests – or who wants to get involved in a research project?

By now, you’ve likely heard that Apple’s iTunes Music Store has taken the #2 spot in music sales — all music sales – right behind retailer giant Wal-Mart. This tends to lead to one of two somewhat gloating reactions from Apple advocates. One is a sort of “rah, rah, go Apple!” attitude. The other is along the lines of “hurrah, discs are dead, go throw your CDs in with your eight tracks and vinyl while we leap into the future!”

A typical sentiment comes from Scott McNulty on The Unofficial Apple Weblog: “I have an iPod, an iPhone, an Apple TV, and I manage all my music with iTunes as I am sure many, many other people out there do as well… “

Eep. Any votes for “I have a Sony Cassette Walkman, a cheap mobile phone, a … TV, and I manage all my music on my bookshelf”? Is that more boneheaded nostalgia?

Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be this way — any of this.

First, it’s hard not to notice that Apple’s success involves a somewhat Borg-like approach to media consumption. All Apple gadgets, all Apple software. Ironically, even Windows users — the people Mac users had for years railed against as overly conformist or beholden to Microsoft-branded stuff — use a variety of listening gadgets and happily reject the clunky Windows Media Player for Winamp, Mediamonkey, and foobar2000, among others. Brand loyalty aside, what if you want other control over cataloging, encoding, and mobile listening? It’s your music collection, after all.

But more importantly, iTunes has itself become a kind of Wal-Mart for music: a retailer so large, it starts to impact the rest of the business and stifles variety. And that wasn’t the vision for online music distribution; supposedly we were all going to be rid of major labels and one-size-fits-all outlets. So, that’s the bad news — the good news is, iTunes’ giant presence may be the best thing that ever happened to music sales. Here’s why:

• Apple’s dominance scared the record industry into dumping DRM. Lots of ink has been given to Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts” memo, which called for eliminating DRM because it’s bad for consumer. But iTunes’ DRM-free music initially cost more and covered less — and Apple was beaten by others to going entirely DRM-free. The real reason major labels dumped baked-in protection was they realized adding DRM to music gave the iTunes/iPod combo total control over the market, and they (rightfully) feared an Apple-dominated music world. Without DRM, you use any player and mobile device you want, meaning you don’t have to buy it from any one vendor. Little wonder that many labels went to nearest rival Amazon first. Dropping DRM wasn’t for the consumer; it was a competitive move.
• Sales of music aren’t down; they’re just moving from physical to online media — then back again. The “sky is falling” argument from labels generally comes down to this: physical media sales are down enough that they’re wiping out the benefits of explosive growth from online sales. Physical is down, online is up, and online isn’t yet making as much money as physical sales did at its peak. But that money is going to legit, online sales, not piracy. And that’s a big relief to the rest of us; the labels can be left to figure out how to make money on the new format. Meanwhile, just as Radiohead offered a premium physical-CD for its best fans….
• The CD isn’t dying — it’s just becoming a luxury item. Bloggers have been comparing the death of CDs to the death of vinyl. Maybe that’s the right comparison, but “death” isn’t the right description — for either one. First, there are still billions in CD sales, so don’t expect CDs to go away any time soon. In fact, the CD could rebound slightly if CD sales outlets and labels can find a way to adjust their business model and releases for this new music listening market. One fair bet: make CDs a luxury item. Just ask vinyl. Vinyl has made a resurgence among hard-core aficionados and DJs, people who love its sound, its packaging, the community of people around specialized retailers — all things that could also be true of CDs. The numbers may be small, but if independents can pick up big margins in little markets, who cares? Take the money and run.
• iTunes’ embrace of a Wal-Mart audience means opportunities for other online retailers. I’ve got two words to sum it up: American Idol, for which Apple is now an official sponsor. Apple has traded in its indie cred for big music business. And tastes in music are more diverse than ever. That means iTunes has nowhere to go but down, as stores like Beatport, dancetracksdigital, Other Music, Bleep, Deutsche Grammaphon pick up specific genres and retailers like Amazon work to win out with unique features and varied content. Apple’s likely to remain healthy, sure, but competitors have both the reason and the opportunity to fight back.

Nothing against Wal-Mart — I’ve bought the odd item there. Or Apple — without Apple, I expect we’d still have bungling majors building broken services of their own, like the pre-iTunes, DRM-laden Napster reactionary stuff. But music lovers benefit from choice. And I think Apple’s very dominance, alongside the death of DRM, could paradoxically let that choice happen.

But let’s be clear: no matter how much you like Apple, one retailer, one store, and one mobile device is not a formula that helps music or encourages innovation. It means one company controls pricing, one company controls assortment, one company decides what margins go to music labels, and one company decides what features you want. That’d be a bleak picture, except I think what Apple is doing is carving out a market it won’t be able to continually dominate — meaning the “one” in all of those will disappear soon. You know, like the eight track.

(photo top right: ktpupp)

Beaport Sync is a free, DJ-friendly music player / librarian / mixing app for Windows and Mac. On its surface, it looks like a hook for online music store Beatport and a beginner-friendly DJ mixer (two tracks, auto tempo detection and time stretching, pitch control) — and it is that.

But aside from the ability to mix and cross-fade, Beatport Sync has some features Apple’s iTunes lacks, which makes it potentially worth a download for just about anyone. First, it has real file format support: MP3 / MP4 / AAC / WMA / WAV / AIFF / FLAC / OGG (plus audio CDs, of course). WMA, FLAC, and OGG are all missing in iTunes. Second, it has advanced meta-data editing and file browsing, making it useful for organizing your music collection. What I really like: not only can you backup your library to external media, but you can browse external media, too. It’s a reminder that iTunes remains pretty primitive for listening and organization — it’s added some decent features, but not so much for the desktop listening experience.

Those aren’t a huge deal on Windows or even Linux with various reliable alternative music players, but they’re big news on the iTunes-dominated Mac. Native Instruments tells CDM that they do expect even their die-hard Traktor users may want Beatport Sync as an organizing tool or basic player.

As far as DJ-style features, this player is pretty decent for a freebie:

• Two-deck mixer with manual/automatic crossfader
• Pitch control
• Time-stretching and tempo detection, for smooth crossfades even if you don’t know what you’re doing (or you’re, say, folding laundry or cleaning your studio and want the software to DJ for you — it happens)
• Rip and burn CDs
• Access external devices for browsing and backup
• iTunes library integration (no playback support for DRMed tracks, though meta-data will appear)

I’ve been testing the release build since just before it came out, and I have to say, I like it. The player is largely no-nonsense, and in terms of format support and playback fidelity, it’s great. You also have the kind of hardware driver support you normally only get from a pro app. And the ability to browse through all your drives instantly is great.

I have just a few caveats for you. If you don’t like getting a music store advertised in your music player, be aware that Beatport is a prominent choice in the sidebar — and the only one. Of course, that’s not to say you can’t buy online music from Beatport rivals like Dance Tracks Digital, or your local record store for those who like physical media. While it’s an aesthetic complaint, you also get the blue and green Beatport colors, which look like they escaped from the local scuba shop. (Give us an alternative black skin, please!) Some might not like the hierarchical file navigation, though I actually do enjoy it. The one downside I did find significant is that there’s not much in the way of stream and radio support. Electronic-music centric Proton is there, if that’s all you want to listen to, but there’s no equivalent for the integrated Shoutcast support in players like Winamp and Songbird. (Hey, I want J-Pop followed by Turkish folk music, okay? Does that make me less of an electronica fan?)

Still, overall, it’s a great player. If you’re serious about your digital music collection, I’d say this is worth at least adding to your tool belt — and the price is right.

Beatport Sync [Native Instruments]

Previously:
MediaMonkey Review: The Ultimate Music Player and Library Organizer for PC (though, on PC, no reason not to run both)

Music lovers, online tools are getting more useful. They can even recognize that song you can’t remember (boy, there are there some evenings of my life I’d like back), and keep you from missing your favorite artists’ gigs in your home town.

Midomi lets you search for artists and songs the old-fashioned way, via text search. But it also lets you perform “voice search” by singing with a microphone. Here’s the extra hook for vocalists: you can put your own performances in here and get rated on your talent. It’s like Google meets American Idol meets artificial intelligence:

Midomi, via Music Gadgets.net

Next up, how often have you heard your favorite, legendary artist played blocks away from you — the week after it happened? There are various online solutions to this problem, but iConcertCal is unique in that it does the work of entering your favorite artists for you, by searching your iTunes library. Now, of course, this could lead to some embarrassing moments, so if you haven’t already cleared that guilty pleasure tune you ripped when you first installed iTunes, now’s the time:

iConcertCal, via the XO Wave Blog

iConcertCal works for both Windows and Mac versions of iTunes. Nice, but anyone know if there’s something like this for MediaMonkey?

Pandora lovers: Tomorrow, I’m having coffee with the founder of Pandora, the nifty music auto-discovery tool. Got any questions you’d like me to ask him? Let me know in comments before tomorrow morning (Wednesday) New York time.

I received my first MP3 file over ten years ago, as a zip archive spanned over three 3.5″ floppy disks. In the time since there have been advances in codec, hardware and software players, metadata formats and online sales, but after more than a decade the humble MP3 is still a dominant force in computer based music listening.

In my time as an MP3 consumer I’ve used a plethora of players, both hard- and software. In the early days, developers racing to add new features had me switching and trying out new applications regularly, but by the late 90s I was a dedicated Winamp user, even through the troublesome Winamp3 days. This all had to change. When faced with a year travelling and working in Europe I decided to retire my trusty 256MB “James” and replace him with a shiny, white, inevitable, 20GB (3rd Gen) iPod. After considerable wrangling (warning NSFW language and unrelated ranting in comments) I grudgingly switched to iTunes, which is an ok piece of software. Really. If all of your music comes to you via iTunes music store or major label CDs you’ve faithfully purchased and ripped (after reading and understanding any included EULAs) then you probably won’t ever need or want another media player. iTunes also has some truly fantastic features: Coupled with judicious iPod-based rating while travelling, Party Shuffle and Smart Playlists changed how I listen to music.

However, If you’re a discerning music listener. If you consume music which is copied from friends or MP3 Blogs, acquaintances with bands, records digitized from your dad’s vinyl collection, or if you occasionally change computers, use multiple computers or multiple ipods, then iTunes will eventually cause you grief.

It’s not the most full-featured application either. Apple’s “less is more” philosophy does make for friendly, simple software, but a quick look at Apple’s supplied Applescripts give you an idea of the basic functions they haven’t bothered with.

Enter Mediamonkey

MediaMonkey is amazing. I’ve been running it for 3 months now and still feel like I haven’t scratched the surface of what it can do. Here’s a quick feature overview from the site:

• Organize music and edit tags in your audio library with a powerful, intuitive interface
• Automatically lookup and tag Album Art and other metadata
• Manage 50,000+ files in your music collection without bogging down
• Play MP3s and other audio formats, and never again worry about varying volume
• Record CDs into OGG, MP3, FLAC and WMA files
• Convert MP3s, OGG, FLAC and WMA files into other formats with the Audio Converter
• Synchronize with iPods / MP3 players effortlessly and convert tracks on-the-fly
• Party Mode, which allows users to make requests while protecting your library from being modified.

There’s a freeware version or you can pay US$19.99 for the “Gold” version ($39.99 for a lifetime licence to all future updates). The commercial features include:

• Increased Speed CD Burning
• File Monitor (automatically updates library)
• Advanced Searches and AutoPlaylists
• Advanced Portable Device Synchronization with on-the-fly format conversion (list of devices supported)
• Unlimited MP3 encoding
• Virtual CD / Previews
• Advanced Filters
• Sleep Timer

I use MediaMonkey more than any other piece of software on my machine, it’s loaded just about 100% of the time, so for me $20 equates to just about no money for something I’ll be running for 16 hours each day. The free version includes the advanced 3rd party scripting abilities though, so you may not even need the Gold licence to get the what you want out of the software.

Reasons Not to Use MediaMonkey

Just to get the major shortcomings out of the way early:
It’s PC only, sorry Mac users, but fortunately the Apple platform’s tighter integration and the huge quantity of 3rd party applescripts available will let you emulate many of these functions.
It’s not the most beautiful user interface and tends to feel a little cluttered. There are a few skins available but I’m sad to say I ended up settling for the default “brushed metal” style skin.
It has a lot of features and options. I personally consider this to be a strength, but if you’re scared of right clicking or want something that “just works”, perhaps iTunes or Winamp is more your speed.

Now that the lightweights have left: I am so in love with this software. It has evolved how I listen to and organize music. When using iTunes I would actually put off downloading albums or tracks from mp3 blogs or other non-mainstream sources, because I knew I’d have to go through the annoying process of tagging and importing so the tracks would show up and sync correctly to my iPod. I ended up using a separate program to audition downloaded tracks before importing them into iTunes. I had also put off changing media players as I have built up years of ratings and statistics which I couldn’t bear to lose.

Switching from Another Player

On installation MediaMonkey detects whether you have iTunes, Windows Media Player or Winamp installed and offers to import all of your rating and playcount information from those programs. When moving from iTunes the only thing left behind was my Smart Playlists. MediaMonkey calls them Autoplaylists and they follow a slightly different format, so you’ll have to make new ones. Autoplaylists allow most of the filter criteria within iTunes (with the notable exclusion of playlists-within-playlists), and plenty of extras including 3 “custom” fields, which you can rename and fill with information of your own devising. This is quite typical of MediaMonkey, while the default program has plenty of features and some cool new ideas, it’s the customization frameworks built in which makes it so powerful. If you’re one of the aforementioned discerning music listeners you’re hardly going to need me to hold your hand for the basics of a media player, so instead I’m going to touch on some of the more advanced features and superb 3rd party scripts and customizations which have me hooked.

MediaMonkey’s Included Coolness

Auto-DJ is like iTunes’ Party Shuffle, but integrated with the normal Now Playing window. If your queue is running out of tracks, Auto-DJ will automatically add new tracks to keep at least 10 upcoming songs at all times. These tracks can be chosen from the entire library, or from a specific playlist.

Auto Organize Files allows you to move and rename files from within the program, so moving previously imported and played tracks from a download directory takes 3 clicks (or 2 shortcut key combinations) rather than the painful open-explorer-move-files-and-locate-them-manually process within iTunes.

Copy and Delete from within the app. Want to send a track to a contact, include it in a project directory or delete something horrible you never want to hear again? Both drag/drop and shortcut key copy/paste work from anywhere in the program, and when deleting a track from the library or a regular playlist you have the option of deleting from the playlist, from the playlist and library, or removing it from the computer as well.

Album Artist Display: Album Artist was only just added to iTunes 7. It’s been part of MediaMonkey since before it was called MediaMonkey, and it has helped me solve an issue I’ve had with media players since I started using them: How to tag and name compilation albums.
Without the Album Artist tag compilation tagging has always been a kludged affair: I had my compilation tracks tagged with the artist as “compilation name” and track name as “track artist – track name”, which isn’t a particularly intuitive solution.
If you use the musician’s name in the “artist” field, then the various tracks from a various artists album will be spread throughout your library. If you use the compilation or dj name as the artist, then those tracks won’t show up with others by the same musician. The Album Artist tag solves this by allowing you to have it both ways.
For instance: If I was to purchase and rip So Fresh – The Hits of Spring 2006 (which I believe to be around volume 572 of the groundbreaking So Fresh series) I would tag the tracks with “So Fresh” as album artist and the musician (or fashion victim) as artist. So if I want my library to display my whole So Fresh collection in all its glory I can sort by Album Artist, whereas if I’d like to see all of my Pussycat Dolls tracks I can sort by Artist.

Find More From The Same: To quickly locate related tracks without rearranging the library you can right click on any track and choose “Find More from Same” artist, album, genre, year etc.

Half Star Ratings: I’ve always had problems dealing with a 5 point rating system. It’s just not enough flexible enough and left me with hundreds of 3 star songs which, really, aren’t 3 star songs. I probably wouldn’t choose to listen to them if presented with a list, but they’re definitely not 2 star tracks. 2 star is for all those annoying hip hop skits and infuriating “hidden tracks”. MediaMonkey allows for half-star ratings, and it also differentiates between “unrated” and “no stars” (bomb). Note that iTunes has been able to display half-star ratings since iTunes 6.0.2, but you need an applescript to set them and they don’t actually do anything.

Advanced 3rd Party Stuff

The MediaMonkey Add-ons page displays a relatively paltry assortment of plugins. However, it is designed to be compatible with the Winamp 2 API, which opens up several thousand other options. However, apart from the Audioscrobbler plugin I haven’t really explored this option, beause the user developed scripts are crazy delicious.

Looking at the official scripts page may again lull you into a false sense of disappointment. Apart from the excellent Magic Nodes there isn’t much there. To find the really great stuff you need to jump into the Scripts and Components forum. To me this is the program’s greatest weakness, all of the very best functionality is hidden away and completely disorganized. This is vaguely understandable as most scripts are constantly under development, so forums are great for people to discuss modifications and updates, but I’d love to see a scripts wiki or user scripts list on the main site. Of the 5200 registered forum members I’m sure a couple would be happy to keep this updated. There is an “All Scripts” thread on the forum, but it’s woefully out of date and presents as an unwieldy list. Most scripts also need to be added manually to MediaMonkey by copying the script code from a forum thread, creating a new file in the MediaMonkey scripts directory and pasting in the code, once again not the most friendly process if you’re trying to discover new functionality.

However, I have plenty of time on my hands, so I have spent several nights gleefully wading through forum threads and testing out scripts to bring you a list of my favourites.

Jaymis’ Favourite MediaMonkey Scripts

Magic Nodes is fantastic. Outwardly it works like Smart Playlists, allowing advanced dynamic filtering, however Magic Nodes lets you use SQL filtering for increased awesomeness, and also displays the results in a tree structure. Example Magic Node strings can be found here.

Auto Album DJ: If you reach the end of your Now Playing list, this script adds a randomly selected album to play next. Minimum tracks, average rating, minimum rating, genre etc. are customizable within the script code.

ScrobblerDJ is another automatic playlist filler. When the final track in now playing is reached this script queries Last.fm for a list of similar artists, then chooses a track from your library from one of those artists. This can cause a bit of a “feedback loop”, filling your playlists with similar, popular artists, but this is great if you’d like to stay within a certain genre or mood, and if the playlist starts going awry you can pull it into a new direction by dropping a track of your intended mood on the end.

Radio Free Monkey is a playlist creation script which weighs tracks based on rating, how long they’ve been in the library etc.

Rate Played Song: If an unrated track is played through to the end, playback is paused and a ratings dialogue pops up.

Predefined Rating creates shortcuts for rating and moving between tracks, allowing you to rate albums quickly.

TweakMonkey allows you to tweak startup settings (volume, auto-play, shuffle, repeat, startup playlist, randomize playlist on startup, startup node) and hide nodes you’re not interested in.

Play History Node: Like having a local last.fm which actually your stats when you play the tracks, rather than a week later when you don’t care anymore.

Extract Fields
allows you to re-tag files based on their current tags. This is useful if you’ve used the aforementioned kludged compilation tagging system instead of album artist tags.

This is only the tiny subset of the available scripts which I’ve found useful or exciting. For more check out the Scripts and Components forum, or the wiki which I’m sure is coming any day now, right? Devs?

Quirks and Requests

MediaMonkey’s thickly piled awesomeness hasn’t made me blind to the problems or aspects which could do with some improvement. Obviously the script discovery and installation system needs an overhaul. I’d like to see an associated filetype extension for MediaMonkey Scripts, or at least some kind of packaging system which will install them for you, rather than having to manually create files and drop them into directories, which feels archaic and will prevent less advanced users discovering how great the program can be.

Tagging or rating the currently playing track will cause the audio to skip. This is an issue as basic as Apple’s longstanding lack of gapless playback: It should not happen, and a remedy should be of highest priority. It took Apple 5 years to add gapless support to the iPod, let’s hope MediaMonkey fix this sooner.

The shortcut keys are rather incongruous: [ctrl + p] for play? [ctrl + n] for next track? These should at least be customizable.

On my dual monitor system (driven by a Radeon X1600) the program always opens in the primary monitor, no matter where it was located when last closed. I’m guessing this may have something to do with the clever, svelte “now playing mode”, but this behaviour is well documented in the forums and doesn’t occur with any other program I run.

Some iTunes features which could do with porting

Smart playlists able to reference other playlists: This opens another level of advanced playlist creation. Examples here, here and here. Apple’s Smart Playlists are also able to match “all” or “any” rules, which can be very useful.

Start Time and Stop Time: Allows you to skip those annoying hip hop skits or “hidden track padding” at the beginning and end of otherwise good music, removing pointless banter and 15 minute silences from your playlists.

Skip Count Displayed: I believe MediaMonkey keeps count of skipped tracks, but it would be useful to have this information available for display and playlist creation.

The Verdict

Fantastic. iTunes 7 has caught up a little and is on another level in the looks department, but it doesn’t come anywhere near the abilities of this Monkey. If you have a PC you owe it to your music, give MediaMonkey a try.