Alert - MediaMonkey Makes a Splash!

With so many apps to play and manage your music library, few actually take management seriously.  MediaMonkey is the real deal and will soon be a heavy hitter if their feature set and power continues to improve as it has in its latest few incarnations.

Windows Media Player was a strong jack of several trades, master of a very few, but a fairly weak library manager.  In 2004, MusicMatch made a good stab at library management as part of its music player but, after being bought by Yahoo for a cool 160 million, they folded 4 years later.  Music players and library managers is a confusing app category that any one has yet to master.

And then there *was* Windows Media Center - a work of art unequaled to this day but limited itself to being a beautiful GUI player that you liked to fondle but left you seeking others for your deeper manipulations.  It's not too surprising that Microsoft dropped the product with Windows 10.  After all, that's what they do.  Create or buy incredible products, develop them to a very nice sweet spot, allow just enough time for a select group to recognize them, then mysteriously drop the product.

Ditto for Microsoft Money, the undisputed kind of elegant and efficient personal finance management.  Of course, once they mastered that category, they dropped the product.

MS just hasn't mastered the art of the con as so beautifully executed by Apple who have made the world believe they've been inventing things after the Apple ][.  Of course, what they have really mastered was the art of selling the least for the most using slave labor and selling them for insanely egregious markups. Jobs was a showman. Wozniak was a genius.

Back to MediaMonkey.  It appears that what they have managed to do is create one of the most advanced music library management systems to date - all wrapped up in an exceedingly capable, albeit complex, music player.  It's like the highest end model of the Swiss Army knife.  It has a huge list of functions that needs a delicate touch else you'll nick your finger.  Our quickie summary is that it has few frills, a lot of controls, and an efficient interface that operates like greased lightning with the power of skins, plug ins, a scripting language, and much more to come. But, like an F-15, you don't just jump in the seat and pull the throttle.

However, it appears to be a work in progress. But what I mean by that is not that it is incomplete but, rather, its designers have given it a design that obviously allows for even more wonderful things.  And that's what we plan to track.  We're anxious to get our hands on a full copy to see how far it has been pushed, how far we can push it ourselves, and what we forecast its designers will be able to due in future versions.  We hope to have a copy in-house soon to start fiddling under its covers.

Although this is just just a product alert and not even a First Look, we heartily recommend you put it on your short list to evaluate.  Its free version already does most of what many users need and more.  We hope to have a First Look soon and a full evaluation in the coming months.  Stay tuned!

~ A Great Deal More to Come ~