You do not need any sophisticated music software tool to listen to your favorite tracks on your PC, but if you also want to have your entire music collection neatly organized, and grouped in playlists and favorites lists, you will need a tool like MusicBee. This excellent free tool is both comprehensive and attractive, with a file tagger, a SoundCloud search engine, and up to three players to choose from.
The program scans your drives and populates your personal collection with all the audio files stored on your system, regardless of where they are. This may help you to detect duplicates that you didn’t know existed – full albums or loose tracks stored more than once in different disks, for instance. If the tracks are properly tagged, they’ll be shown not only in alphabetical order but also organized by artist. If they’re not, the program offers you various tagging utilities, including an Album Auto-Tagger. If they happen to include an image of the disc cover, you’ll see it as an icon along each track. If you happen to have podcasts or talking books on your drives, the program will also identify them as such and will place them on a different tab.
When it comes to playing back your favorite music, MusicBee offers your three players in different sizes and with different layouts for different purposes. The standard player follows the size and looks of the program’s main page, and it shows a big picture of the artist playing and a plethora of other information. The compact player is a medium-sized player with the same attractive layout but smaller. Finally, the miniplayer is basically a small rendition of the disc cover and some basic controls to help you jump from track to track without opening the program’s main interface.
You can organize your music in whatever way you prefer. The tool can create playlists with your favorite tracks, and can locate new streaming tracks for you to add to your player and playlists. The tool connects with iTunes for excerpts of similar tracks, and can search for new music for you on SoundCloud without leaving MusicBee. No download capabilities have been included, though, so any external tracks you add to your playlists will only be playable via an Internet connection.
MusicBee is an extremely attractive and useful little utility. This free software player and music organizer is excellent for all music lovers, regardless of whatever computer skill they may or may not have. It is simple to use and terribly useful to locate not only new music on the Web, but also a specific track among large collections of tracks.
v1.2 [Nov 13, 2009]
- new detection of gapless info tags for iTunes encoded mp3 and m4a files for playback in MB (gapless playback is already handled for most LAME encoded mp3 files). Still to be done at a later date, tracks saved to iPods using MusicBee dont have the gapless playback data written to the iPod database
- new Audio Books section (playback of audio books doesnt support chapters yet ie. only the file title displays and not the current chapter)
- new detection of iTunes podcast tags when scanning files - if podcast flags are detected the track will scanned to the podcasts section
- new detection of audiobooks (.m4b) when scanning files - these files will be added to the Audio Books
- new drag/drop tracks from library to Audio Books or to Podcasts - if you have already scanned a podcast or audiobook into your main library you can now manually drag it to appropriate Audio Book or Podcast section
- new replay gain (smart/track/album) switch in the Controls menu
- new equaliser button now shows a different icon if the equaliser or any dsps are active
- new copy text selection from web-browser
- new handling for data DVDs (if it doesnt work for you please let me know - there is already a separate bug topic for this)
- change behaviour when 'portable application' is enabled so the musicbee library is stored as a relative reference in the startup settings. However files referenced in the main MusicBee library itself use full paths.
Mall Creeps
