by max power on 26 May 2012, 05:50
MediaMonkey Gold is a very powerfull piece of software, but after having it manage 40,000+ songs, it tends to get a bit bloated and slow.
However for the convenience of having it running at low-priority behind Cross and being able to quick-search my ENTIRE library of music to find a particular track, I see it as a necessary evil. I also leave it cued with a track (routed through outputs 5/6 of the U-44MK2 and into chan 3 of my mixer), just in case something BAD happens and I lose audio, I can hit a global hotkey (OS-wide, it even triggers if Cross is the front program) to start a track.
I just wish there was a lightweight library-management application that could handle bucketloads of tunes like this without mangling tags etc (Like iTunes does when you go over about 20k tracks) or slowing down the interface.
I looked at various free offerings before settling on MM, and to be honest none of them came close to the 'all-in-one' solution that MediaMonkey offers. As much as it does chunk down a bit, I can use it for tag management, gain leveling, album artwork/tag fetching, cd burning, cd ripping, playlist making, file sorting, and the list goes on.
If you want ONE piece of software that will manage your needs, but don't mind dealing with a bit of lag (mostly in the interface), I'd say mediamonkey gold.
Peace!
Max