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.
v3.2 [Jun 22, 2018]
- New grid like layout (similar to iTunes) that can be configured in the Album and Tracks view.
- Enhanced DSD support for ASIO devices that support raw DSD data or DOP (DSD over PCM).
- New vertical tag editor. This can be configured to display in any side panel and allows you to configure the fields that are editable.
- Various new layout options in the Layout(1) preferences.
- Row spacing is now expanded a few pixels but can be configured more or less compressed.
- Custom background image that spans the entire application eg.
- disable resizing on panels.
- You can now save/ load custom layout settings separately for each tab. Right click on a tab header.
- You can now save/ load a snapshot of all your settings.
- You can now save/ import your panel arrangement - the exported settings are suitable to send to friends.
- Virtual tags now support markup (colour, font, contrast) so you can mix the colour used in a single displayed field.
- Artwork view now supports grouping by Date Added.
- Artwork view now supports sub-grouping using various fields.
- Expanded panel in the Artwork view can now be forced to display as a single column.
- Relative paths are now supported for artwork retrieval. Set in Layout(1)/ artwork retreival/ Edit List.
- Playlists now display a header bar. This can be disabled.
- The popup for the playing track now has the option to also popup at the end of a track (so you can rate it).
- You can force the Locked Down mode (in the View menu) to persist on restart.
- Compact Player can now be run full screen (set from the menu button on the left of the caption bar).
- You can now directly edit an artist biography in the Artist Bio panel.
- When synching lyrics, you can force them to be embedded or synched as a separate .lrc file.
- Cut/ Copy/ Paste is now supported for folders in the Computer node of the left navigator.
- Custom Tags can now be configured to be enumerated data types. When editing the tag, a drop-down list is displayed with checkboxes making editing easier.
- new hotkeys:
Tools: Auto-Tag by Track - Update Missing Lyrics.
Send To: Active Playlist (now playing).
Send To: Active Playlist (selected files).
View: Toggle Show Vertical Tag Editor.
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