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.
v2.4 [Mar 16, 2014]
- UPNP plugin support which enables output to a UPnP device or to browse and play content in your MusicBee library from a UPnP compatible renderer.
See http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=14277.0
- XBOX music plugin which includes:
- Music Explorer which provides searching and filtering to explore artists and tracks, including integration with last.fm and also echonest for track filtering
- Radio Streaming which offers tag based radio streams. Create the station in the Radio node from the Station Directory panel
- see http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=13878.0
- support for playback of DSD files
- Improved Field selector for the main panel, column browser, library explorer, search field selection etc
- Change to the behaviour of the ticked fields - now all items are ticked by default and any unticked items remembered on restart and excluded from various actions such as device file synchronisation
- New hotkeys:
- Edit: Crop Selected Files - removes all files from a playlist except the selected files (also accessible from the List/ Crop Selected Files right click menu)
- Edit: Save
- Edit: Save/ Goto Next
- New command to save an embeded picture as a file - right click on the picture/ Save Picture To...
- New template editor (naming templates, virtual fields etc) that allows multi-line input and improved field selector
- Improved drag/ drop scrolling operation which speeds up the scroll when dragging items down long lists
- You can now keep specific tracks in an album in sequence when shuffling. Edit the relevant files and tick "keep tracks in sequence when shuffling"
- Various dialog windows are now resizable and remember their last position
- Support for the shoutcast station directory in the Radio tab
- The total time displayed in the status bar for all files in the Now Playing list can be toggled to show the time remaining
- Various bug fixes
Mall Creeps
