Silly Old Bear

I do not have an iPod.

My son Justin has a really nice iPod that we bought for him as a Christmas gift a few years back. But I don’t have an iPod.

(He also has a better car than me, a better cell phone than me, etc., etc., etc. The things we do for our kids!)

However, in spite of this complete lack of equity in the quality of my few paltry possessions compared to his, there is one area in which the inequity leans completely in my favor.

I will always be better-looking than him!

That gives me at least some sense of satisfaction.

(OK, fine … so he’s better-looking than me, too!)

Anyway, back to the iPod (or lack thereof, as the case may be). Even though I don’t own one of the magic little music boxes, that hasn’t kept me from jumping on the digital music MP3 bandwagon. Even without an iPod, I have almost 10,000 digital audio tracks on my laptop.

(Notice the “Digital Song Tally” button in the right-hand sidebar on the front page. No, seriously, go take a look at it and then come back here . . . I’ll wait.)

Meet the Monkey

OK, welcome back. (I missed you!) You probably noticed that the “Digital Song Tally” button says something about “my MediaMonkey”. You may be wondering, “What in the world is a MediaMonkey?” To which I would answer, “MediaMonkey is a really cool piece of software that manages your MP3 collection on your computer, and then syncs those MP3′s with your iPod (if you have one) or other MP3 player.” Kind of like iTunes, only a whole lot better!

When I first heard about MediaMonkey (probably a year ago or so), it captured my interest, so I did some reading up on it. It touts itself as “The Music Manager For Serious Collectors”. As of version 3.0.3, one of the listed improvements is “much-improved performance for collections of 100,000+ tracks”. I would say that qualifies as a “serious collection”!

Organizing Your Files

When organizing your audio tracks on your hard drive, MediaMonkey gives you much more flexibility than iTunes. You can specify exactly what folder and file name structure you want MediaMonkey to use when organizing your files, and you can specify the level of control you want MediaMonkey to exercise when it comes to organizing, moving, and renaming your audio files based on your specified organizational structure — from fully automatic to fully manual.

For example, I’ve set up my organizational structure as follows. Whenever I add an audio track to my MediaMonkey library, or whenever I change the ID3 tag information associated with an audio file, MediaMonkey moves the file to “My Documents\My Music”, into a folder based on the name of the Album Artist, then a sub-folder based on the name of the Album, and then a file name based on the name of the Song. You can specify the base folder for your music collection (My Documents\My Music in my case), and then customize your preferred file structure using almost any of the ID3 tags.

For compilation albums, where the Album Artist is “Various Artists” or something similar, if you put the individual Artist’s Name in the ID3 tag for each individual track, MediaMonkey will include the track artist’s name in its scrollable Artist list. I remember being extremely frustrated when I discovered that iTunes listed only “Various Artists” in the Artist list for such tracks, rather than the individual track artist’s name.

Free vs. Not Free

MediaMonkey comes in two flavors: free and Gold. The main differences between the two are as follows:

1. In the free edition, the MP3 encoder (which allows you to import songs into MediaMonkey directly from your CD’s) times out after 30 days. However, at that point you can install your own separate copy of the very same MP3 encoder (which is open source and free) to overcome this limit (and the MediaMonkey documentation even points this out).
2. The free version will only burn CD’s at 4x speed, while the Gold version will burn at full speed up to 48x.
3. MediaMonkey Gold’s search feature is quite robust. For example, if you know the name of a composer, and you have entered that composer’s name into the appropriate ID3 tag on any of his or her songs, searching for that composer by name will include his or her songs in the list of search results. iTunes doesn’t do that (at least not with the last version that I used, prior to switching to MediaMonkey and becoming iTunes-free).

The Gold version is currently priced at $19.95, which includes all updates to the current primary version number. For example, the current version is 3.0.6, so all 3.x updates would be free if you purchased your license now. However, you can optionally purchase a lifetime license for $39.95 that includes free updates for life.

Not Free for Free (well, almost)

But wait! Don’t drop twenty bucks for the Gold version just yet (although it’s easily worth twenty bucks to anyone serious about organizing and syncing digital music). Here’s the really cool part (besides all the incredible features of the software). I obtained my copy of MediaMonkey Gold for free (plus $5.67 shipping and handling) through an innovative offer called TrialPay. Here’s how it works.

1. Go to MediaMonkey’s TrialPay page , and click on the “Get MediaMonkey Gold Free!” button. That will take you to the official TrialPay page for MediaMonkey.
2. Enter your name and e-mail address in the appropriate boxes, and click the “Continue” button.
3. Search through the TrialPay offers and find one that you are interested in, complete the offer, and TrialPay will pay MediaMonkey the twenty bucks for your copy of MediaMonkey Gold! How sweet is that?

Each TrialPay offer has different requirements. Here’s how I ended up paying just $5.67 for my TrialPay offer and getting MediaMonkey Gold for free.

In the TrialPay “Business & Office” category, I selected the VistaPrint offer for free holiday cards (“only pay shipping and handling for the free cards”). They also had an offer for 250 free business cards, where all you pay is shipping and handling. Once I completed my order on VistaPrint’s website, paying $5.67 on a credit card for the shipping and handling charges, I received an e-mail from TrialPay with instructions on retrieving my free copy of MediaMonkey Gold. That’s all there is to it!

So, whether you go with the free version, pay for the Gold version, or get the Gold version free using TrialPay, I highly recommend MediaMonkey to anyone who wants to organize their digital tunes and kiss iTunes goodbye!

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This entry was posted by Paul O'Rear on Saturday, November 8th, 2008 at 5:56 PM. If you would like to keep track of Comments on this post left by other Silly Old Bear visitors, you can do so through the RSS 2.0 feed. You are invited to leave a Comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.