MediaMonkey : A Lifesaver

I'm sure a lot of people listen to digital music and there are even a certain few that still love a good old LP record. I'm more of an mp3 type of person and I realized to my dismay that over the years I had accumulated a great number of songs (some 4000 odd) and I really did not have it very organized or accessible. Add to this the fact that my whole collection had copies in my backup hard drive and even more copies in random places and I had a huge mess on my hands.

My preference for the music i listen to keeps changing depending on my mood (and in some cases if a song gets saturated after listening to it too much). So the only organization of music I had was a few folders like English, Hindi, Tamil, Soundtracks and then that last and definitely the least favorite, Others. This Others folder was like a bottomless pit of music that i wasn't currently in the mood to listen to. So I was scouring the web looking for a software that will help me manage my mdeia library with some support for tagging and the works. Windows Media Player and Winamp are ok for various reasons but they're not very condusive to managing large media libraries. So enter Media Monkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/) and my life was saved in the matter of a couple of hours.

I installed the software and set up an auto-organize filter to store all the music in one folder (sorted like Music/artist/album/song). Then I got the player to scour my hard drives and find all the music files that it could and add them to the library all while sorting them out into the folder structure I mentioned before. There is a library tab on the side thru which can reach a section called files to edit and here very neatly is a section for duplicate files. Turns out, I had upto 7 copies of some of my songs so a LOT of hard drive space was being wasted. And the best part was that during the import all the copies were marked with a (1),(2),(3) etc suffix. So it was the simplest thing to find all of these and delete them. So in less than two hours i've got my music organize and the duplicates are all gone. I added an advanced duplicate finder (you can add custom scripts) and I also spent another hour or so tagging files. It can lookup CD information from Amazon and even download Album Art. It even has a Party Mode and an Auto DJ feature which ensures that there is always a song playing.

So all i can say is, if you have a big music collection and you want to organize it with minimum hassle, all while having a very convenient music player, then look no further, MediaMonkey is perfect.

EDIT -- It can automatically sync with Ipods and even my Nokia music phone.