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Posted by dadiOH on 01/09/06 14:53
Technobarbarian wrote:
> "dadiOH" <dadiOH@wherever.com> wrote in message
> news:kpQvf.325$sa4.188@trnddc07...
>> Rob Weekhout wrote:
>>
>>> Let us know what your opinion is about M.M !!!
>>
>> Since you asked...
>>
>> When it was SongsDB it just flat out didn't work. Not reliably.
>> Does it now? It is better but I figure that if someone releases a
>> flaky program they simply don't care and I'm not interested in future
>> releases.
>>
>> It was also huge. Still is. "Huge" = five or more times the size of
>> other similar and better programs.
>>
>> It also created a huge database - the equivalent of almost eight
>> ID3V1 tags for each and every song. Still does.
>>
>> It was very slow scanning for MP3s.
>>
>> My overall opinion is that there are many far better programs around.
>
> Ok, I looked at MP3Rat and wasn't impressed enough to actually
> download the thing. I gotta agree with Rob, Media Monkey is the best
> that I've seen. I don't care about scanning speed, I can still use it
> while it's scanning and only the new stuff is affected by the speed
> of the scan. Huge database? Yawn, I've got over a terrabyte of
> storage, a few bytes here or there is no big deal any more. The
> current version works and works well. It has for at least a couple
> years now that I'm aware of. I don't use all the features, there are
> certainly better tagging programs around; but, as far as keeping
> track of a lot of MP3s easily it's excellent. So what are these many
> other far better programs?
I went through a bunch of MP3 DB programs when I was looking for same
4,5,6 years ago. Most were <shrug>. Since then, I have tried others
too. Here are a few I recall as having some merit....
_______________
First of all, MP3Rat. There are three things I particularly liked about
it during the month or two I had it installed. In no particular
order...
1. It is fast in everything it does. Search is virtually instantaneous
with 40K songs, for example
..
2. It has a method whereby the user can set up their own set(s) of
catagories.
3. It seems to be an elegant program; i.e., written by someone who knew
what they were doing rather than someone who grabbed a copy of Visual
Basic and had at it. IMO, writing a program is more than simply coming
up with something that works...the *way* it works is equally important.
OK, people no longer bit fiddle, no longer agonize over T-states vs.
code size but there is still a difference...it is sort of the difference
between a Ford Crown Victoria and a Porsche...between a Golden Corral
buffet and a five star restaurant.
Someone posted elsewhere in the thread that no work had been done on it
for some time. No big thing, IMO...there are two reasons programmers
update programs - to fix a bug or add "features". If a program is right
in the first place and already includes necessary features...
The same person mentioned a redundancy of ID3v1 tags (presumably ID3v1
and ID3v1.1?). I didn't notice same but if it exists the programmer
oughta fix it. I wonder if the poster let them know about it?
________________
Music Library
http://www.wensoftware.com/MusicLibrary/
I liked it quite well. I used it mostly to look up song info for MP3s
without tags, stopped using it because as it got too slow for me after
maybe 20K songs.
_________________
MediaJukebox
http://www.musicex.com/mediajukebox/features.html
A very nice all in one program; IOW, it is big but unlike MM keeps a
database of a realistic size. My main complaint against it is that one
can't use Winamp as a player from it.
_____________________
Dapyx MP3 Explorer
http://www.dapyx-soft.com/
Generally, I like this program despite the fact that it is slower than
the others. It has one (to me) very annoying characteristic: when you
open the program, it opens to a nearly maximized size even if you have
dragged it smaller before closing it.
__________________
ShufflePlay
http://www.fliptech.net/shuffleplay/index.shtml
Been a long time since I tried it but my notes tell me I liked it.
I was looking through stuff I have archived in a DB a day or two ago and
came across another one; now I can't find it. Had a tabbed interface
for "Album", "Genre", etc. I liked it too, anyone know it?
___________________
MP3Stock
http://surf.to/mp3stock
This is what I use and have for almost five years. No fancy GUI, just
"spreadsheet style"; won't do ID3v2 tags, I don't use them; it isn't a
tagger though it will write tags. So why do I like it? Because...
1. It is small
2. Its DB is small...40K MP3s = 5277KB database
3. It is fast...fast loading, fast scanning, fast sorting
4. I can find anything I want in various ways and find it quickly.
5. It uses Winamp as a player
6. It has a couple of handy copy features. For example, if I want to
make a data CD for a portable it will copy what I select to a folder for
easy burning and I can set the size of that folder (700MB is usual).
I used to always recommend it because it was truly the best available
IMO. I do so infrequently now because people seem to want flash...the
bells and whistles ala MM. The only program I ever considered dumping
it for was MP3Rat because of the latter's ability to creat
catagories...something I would like. However, I've worked around that
in Stock by using the comment field; since I was used to it and it was
effective for me I kept it.
--
dadiOH
____________________________
dadiOH's dandies v3.06...
....a help file of info about MP3s, recording from
LP/cassette and tips & tricks on this and that.
Get it at http://mysite.verizon.net/xico
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