Wherefore art thou, MusicMatch?

Way back in the late 90's I bought a new computer that came preinstalled with a copy of MusicMatch Jukebox (MMJB) version 3. At the time I was a huge fan of WinAmp, but figured I'd give it a try. I'm glad I did, because I fell in love with MMJB almost instantly. It let me easily manage my already huge and ever increasing collection of mp3s and let me tag them easily. It would even look up tag info on the internet and let me choose which info to add to the files. Then I found my favorite feature of all - AutoDJ!

AutoDJ was a feature that would automatically create a playlist of songs based on a few simple criteria set in the dialog box. This made it super-easy for me to get a bunch of songs ready to play while I was using my computer, without having to add them manually. It eventually even let you pick songs from similar artists or genres, making it even better.

I loved MMJB so much that I actually purchased the full version almost right away, and even paid the premium cost (double the price) to get an "all future versions" license so that I would always have the latest and greatest version of the product. Over the years other media players and media managers came along, but none of them could compete with MMJB .



Then one day it happened - I lost faith in MusicMatch. I had rebooted my computer after installing a new application, and when I clicked the icon to launch MusicMatch a little dialog window popped-up informing me that MusicMatch had been sold to Yahoo! and would become "Yahoo!Music Jukebox". Yahoo claimed that everything would be okay, and that the product would remain the pretty much the same and that all of us that had the "all future versions" license would be taken care of. Long story short - that was a complete lie!

Oh sure, Yahoo did indeed create a Yahoo looking media player/manager program and upgraded me to the premium version when I entered my MusicMatch license key, and it even migrated my library of music over to the new app. But YMJ was not a comparable replacement for MMJB. Rather than focusing on letting me manage my library easily, instead it focused on looking at my library and trying to tell me about other artists that I might be interested in. It was even nice enough to let me purchase songs from those artists right away. How nice of them to provide me with a way to give them money.

Worse than that, my absolute favorite feature of MMJB (remember AutoDJ) was no longer part of the program. After some research I learned that Yahoo decided that feature wasn't important and pulled it out. I could understand not wanting to invest time and effort improving that feature or expanding it, but what cost is there in simply keeping that code in there? It already worked, and worked well. Surely there couldn't be a huge number of bugs in the AutoDJ code.

So, after giving YMJ a try for several months - and hating every minute of it - I decided to return to using MMJB (which I never removed from my system). However, MMJB no longer worked properly. It would crash most of the time, and when it didn't crash, it wouldn't let me manage my library. I couldn't add new tracks. I couldn't remove old tracks. I couldn't edit tags. Nothing. Needless to say, I was very upset.

So, I've started looking for a new replacement for MMJB, and after a little research, I have found MediaMonkey. Lots of former MMJB users are switching over to MediaMonkey and have a lot of great things to say about it. I have installed the free version of the program and have started using it. I'll post more info in my experience as I get into it more.