Growing to Love Media Monkey and Sansa Clip+

[Big Sky]

Got some time off to mess around with a Rockbox Clip+ and Media Monkey.

There is so much depth to both MM and Rockbox. I am taking the time today to try to figure it all out.

Media Monkey: It has never been so easy to manage and edit music. I have used Sonic Stage, WinAmp, Itunes. I was forced to use it since my clip isn't recognized by WinAmp, good thing. It was pretty easy to get around and edit. My impression is so far is that it might be the best Media Player/interface I have yet to use. There still is a lot to learn on utilizing the player to its full potential but I have time. This is gonna be fun.

Rockbox Clip: While this is old new to many Clip users. I just never had the time to mess around with Rockbox. I have spend some time figuring out how to clear previous databases not much but some time. The only issue is the Themes. With my failing eyesight smaller themes have the detail I can need but can read well. Larger themes are a challenge to me since I don't really know Rockbox that well as of yet. The real challenge is the Yellow/Blue screen of a Clip +...for me it is difficult to read. I have Rockboxed any other player but thinking of Rockboxing the Clip Zip to see if that helps.

The tweaks that you can do with a Rockbox Clip really makes the Clip sing. I don't think I have heard a better sounding Clip or player for that matter. I know this may sound like a neophyte but then again I am a neophyte when it comes to Rockbox.

In short this has made me fall in love with a old clip.

[CrowdAds]

[Mo. FryDaddy]

I have the pro version, and yeah it's really nice software. Sometimes there's hiccups here and there but it almost never crashes.

My Itunes friends don't like MM because they "can't figure it out", which I think is funny.

[The DarkSide]

MM is great. It also allows me to take m3u playlist files I've created with iTunes & sync them with my other players.

Plus, it allows me to set a per device sync bitrate,...something people crave on this site. I didn't feel like going into major detail about it in the other "Bitrate Software" thread. I have one player set to have all my stuff down-converted to 128kbps, and another for 192kbps.

Yup, MediaMonkey TRULY kicks the llama's AZZ!!!

[Marvin the Martian]

I have the lifetime "Gold" license. Great piece of software, although I don't use the video capabilities.

[McDougal]

I used to use MM all the time, but I don't like the new version. Ever since version 4 was released, it hasn't worked well for me. That's not saying it isn't good software...it's just not what I prefer.

I prefer foobar2000. But I also have iTunes to manage my iPod.

[The DarkSide]

TBH I preferred it more when it was audio only. The added video management and playback get in my way.

[Marvin the Martian]

Originally Posted by The DarkSide

TBH I preferred it more when it was audio only. The added video management and playback get in my way.

Yeah, they should have kept it audio-only. But it still does what I need it to do.

[The DarkSide]

Originally Posted by Marvin the Martian

Yeah, they should have kept it audio-only. But it still does what I need it to do.

Agreed! It's still the best,...

[Marvin the Martian]

Of course, it is only a matter of time before someone posts "drag and drop FTW"....lol.

And to be fair, I do that more often than not now, as far as loading my players. But these programs do have their uses nonetheless.

[McDougal]

Originally Posted by Marvin the Martian

Of course, it is only a matter of time before someone posts "drag and drop FTW"....lol.

And to be fair, I do that more often than not now, as far as loading my players. But these programs do have their uses nonetheless.

Drag & Drop FTW!!!! just kidding...lol .

[skip252]

Drag and drop works but the right choices in software makes life much easier. MediaMonkey (free version) was what I used to organize the thousands of untagged, disorganized files I had. When I decided to do a once and for all reorganization I looked into other software and found foobar2000 worked better for me. I won't say it's the best but foobar2000 does essentially everything I need.

I rip, tag, embed album art, move files to and from my players and reorganize my files AutoOrganize style with it now. I have presets to auto convert for every type player I have now. I think of it as drag and drop deluxe. It doesn't exactly sync but now that I've created the right presets I can get a lot more done than I ever could with MM. I won't deny it was a fair amount of work learning how to get things just the way I wanted but now that I have I think it was worth the effort.

[McDougal]

Going slightly off-topic....but it's great to have an organized media library .

A while back I decided to organize my lossy collection as follows:

Artist\Album\track2 - title

This is the filename that Amazon uses for their MP3s, and I like it. I'd prefer not to have long filenames. I used MusicBee to organize everything a while ago. Now whenever I have some new music I move the files in foobar by going to "File Operations>Move to...".

[Tapeworm]

Originally Posted by Marvin the Martian

Of course, it is only a matter of time before someone posts "drag and drop FTW"....lol.

Originally Posted by McDougal

Drag & Drop FTW!!!! just kidding...lol .

A whole 54 minutes. C'mon you guys, you're slippin'. Must be 'cause it's Saturday.

[CDMP3PlayerFan]

Originally Posted by The DarkSide

TBH I preferred it more when it was audio only. The added video management and playback get in my way.

Originally Posted by Marvin the Martian

Yeah, they should have kept it audio-only. But it still does what I need it to do.

I like some of the changes they made to MediaMonkey. The ability to specify where I want files loaded on my player allows me to take advantage of my player's podcast functions rather than having to use another program to manage my podcasts or load the podcasts manually.

Still, I would have preferred it to remain audio only. In addition to the video support, Version 4 has added a great deal of complexity that makes MediaMonkey much more complicated to use.

[Marvin the Martian]

My Mediamonkey looks like this.....

[Mo. FryDaddy]

Nice use of the Eclipse theme! Makes the player look great!

[Marvin the Martian]

Originally Posted by Mo. FryDaddy

Nice use of the Eclipse theme! Makes the player look great!

The default skins are all so boring, I decided I had to switch things up.

[Mo. FryDaddy]

The only thing I want in addition to that skin is for the text to be green, black and green are meant to go together IMO. Basically the colors 000000 and 00ff00. I should just edit the skin I suppose now that I think about it.

[skip252]

Mine looks like it does coming out the box. I have the free version. Guess I've never been big on what my media player looks like as long as it works.

This thread made me wonder if I could make MM 4 into the bug free, responsive program I liked so much before with a little tweaking. I've looked at the loaded plugins and removed some that weren't doing anything I needed. It's worked really well so far. I won't be ditching fb2k anytime soon but I could live with how it is now.

The first thing I wanted to do was kill the video support. Taking out the f_video.dll did that. Then I dumped all the dlls that seemed to be for with video and the audio codecs I never use. No sense in loading a .dll for Monkey Audio as I don't have a single .ape file.

With the Winamp style plugin architecture MM has there isn't much chance of really screwing things up unless you permanently delete a library. Even then all you have to do is reinstall. That can be somewhat of a PIA so it's best to be careful.

The results have been encouraging. Load times have been reduced considerably. They've gone down several seconds. There's also been a nice drop in resource usage. Checking my notes on an older installation it seems it's running about 12-15% lighter on the same machine.

I've fiddled around with removing different .dlls and it seems the biggest payoff comes comes from just getting rid of the video capability. Once that's gone the load time shortens and the sluggish, buggy behavior calms down.

I couldn't recommend MM after the 4.x upgrade. I think with just this little tweak it may go back on my list of programs someone may want to use to get their library organized.

[Marvin the Martian]

skip, you're a clever dude.

After reading your post, I went in and removed just the video dlls, and it sure does load in faster. I'll have to remember to do the same the next time I boot up my laptop.

I probably could do the same as you, removing the dll for APE....especially since I only use MM for my lossy files....but this seems to work well enough that I'll probably leave it be for now.

Thanks for sharing!