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.
v2.0 [Mar 16, 2012]
TheaterMode plugin that has a visually oriented and minimalistic layout
1.player enhancements
--improved buffering for music playback
--15-band equalizer
--playback of cuesheet files is now continuous
--OPUS file support
--HDCD decoder plugin
--support for Winamp output plugins
2.interface enhancements
--windows 7 AeroSnap is now supported for skinned window borders
--the main menu can now display as a button in the windows caption bar
--tabs can now be docked in the windows caption bar
--new "flat layout" for the player controls panel that has a more modern look
--save and load custom views
--various layout settings and enhancements
--auto-open the left navigator panel when it is collapsed
various new hotkey functions
--select or skip playback of files using a tickbox
3.auto-playlists enhancements
--filter on similar artists and on similar tracks to the current playing track
--various shuffling types to change the distribution of the matching tracks: Random; Higher Rating Preferred; Same/Different Artist
--filter out duplicate tracks with the same artist and title on multiple albums
--manually add extra files by drag/dropping files into the auto-playlist
--filter based on information for the current playing track
--the auto-DJ can now select similar tracks to the current playing track
--plugin to generate playlists based on data from last.fm
4.infrastructure:
--support for windows 8
--upgrade to .NET4
--upgrade the internal web-browser to the equivalent of Firefox 16
-video support (playback via a plugin and video file organization)
-new Swedish translation and updated translations for: Dutch, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Simplified Chinese
-numerous other changes as documented in the
Mall Creeps
