SwingDJs

Hi

I want to recommend a software I've been using for 6-7 years. They recently came up with a new version, and it's the best yet.

It's called Media Monkey: www.mediamonkey.com

It's a great media organizing library, very flexible columns and tags, automatic play lists based on criteria, powerful search and query builder, and lots of other cool features. It really helps when you have thousands of songs, and I can find and pin point songs very fast. It has nice shortcuts to locate relate songs (same genre, BPM range, ratings, ambience, etc...). For example, I can very easily find a "nice slow dixieland blues song but with energetic trumpets" at the click of only a few buttons. It also has VB based scripting engine, and you can define your own scripts, macros or download other open source scripts.

It especially works great in conjunction with a player or a mixing software (like winamp or pc dj), you use mediaMonkey to organize and find your music, and the other one to mix and queue songs up.

It also supports almost all mp3 players (including ipods, with no restrictions!), and knows how to synchronize your computer with them, as well as synchronize your laptop with your desktop (if you have one).

And, it's developed by a small group of developers, with solid user community and no big name interests behind it. It is one of the few softwares I am actually happy to pay for, because I know the money goes directly to the people who been working on it for the past 7-8 years.

There is a free version with basic searching, and a gold version for $20 that has full features.

Can it handle multiple outputs?

Media Monkey is mainly for organizing your songs, searching, tagging and scripting. It's playing capabilities are basic and comparable to winamp. Usually you would integrate it with another software for playing and mixing, it has full drag and drop features, and you could add scripts to it that will automatically queue the songs for you in your favorite player.

Also, I forgot to add, it has a nice feature that allows you to search for songs by the date they were last played, and how many times have you played them. so you can create automatic playlists to contain tunes you like but didn't play lately. I always do that when I want to break out of a pattern, and it gets me the top 50 that I haven't played in a while. It also has a feature where it can retrieve for you a random top 50 (or any other number) from any criteria you want. So for example, you can get a total random set of 50 of your 5 star tunes that have certain BPM. It's nice because it reminds of songs I might have forgotten about otherwise.

So... it sort of sounds like J.River except with lesser play capability but better (or preset) search functions. Actually no, with all the emphasis on scripting etc it sounds more like foobar. I only played around with mediamonkey very briefly before settling onto jriver. The monkey does have a larger community support though, and from what I understand has more downloadable goodies and modules (basically like Firefox add-ons, except for your music player).

*Bump*

Anyone else have recent experience with this software?

Yup. Love it.

I got media monkey because it handles FLAC & FLAC tags (or Vorbis comments, if you prefer) as easily as it handles ID3 tags. Media Monkey will also convert between formats on the fly. You can burn a CD with wav, mp3, FLAC, and m4a and the conversion will happen on the fly.

In addition, there are good filters for finding duplicate songs in your collection - in any format.

Media Monkey will also manage podcasts, if you listen to any of those.

If you use Media Monkey as your library manager, what do you use for DJing?

No reason it can't do both. I still prefer J.River myself, but both are very versatile programs.