Switching from Media Monkey

[bailso]

Hi All
I have posted this as a new topic on advice from a forum message.
After comparing Media Monkey and Musicbee I have no doubt that Musicbee has a number of advantages. However there is one major roadblock to switching for anyone that has a substantial time investment in maintaining a Media Monkey database . This is the difficulty in transferring all this information to Musicbee.
Has anyone had any recent success in solving this issue in a way that might be achievable for a non technical person? If so how was this achieved?
Thanks and regards.

[theta_wave]

I was in the same shoes as you last week.  I've been using MM for over ten years but MB, so far, has been awesome (a lot of ways to customize).  The pic below contains Mediamonkey's custom tag fields that you would probably like to sync.  MB transferred ratings and all of the custom tags (provided you follow what is seen below).  The only thing that MB did not sync were playcounts.  Luckily, I always scrobbled my plays through Last.fm and MB's Last.fm playcount sync is far better than MM's addon (the latter gave me wildly high playcounts on many tracks; luckily I backed up mm.db before initiating it).

Remember for mp3's, MM's custom fields are COMM/Songs-DB_Custom# (this was a typo in MM's tag chart: http://www.mediamonkey.com/sw/webhelp/frame/index.html?abouttrackproperties.htm).  I would first enter in the data for custom fields as shown in my pic below and then import a directory or two and see if the tags and ratings imported correctly.  After that, import the rest.



My MM.db is 1.7GB and MB's db is only 300MB!

EDIT: I forgot to add that your initial testing should include albums containing tags you want to import.  Highlight a song, shift+enter (or right click > edit) and hit tag inspector (red arrow: see below) to see how the tags are formatted (pay attention to the tag code).  Afterwards, you can create custom tags and those values will be imported in short order.  When you write into those tags in MB, they will show up in Mediamonkey too!

[Steven]

google this forum for info on a mediamonkey itunes xml file plugin.
MB can import play counts (or any other fields not saved to file) from the iTunes xml file.
However i do recall it being stated that mediamonkey plugin doesnt work with all fields

[theta_wave]

google this forum for info on a mediamonkey itunes xml file plugin.
MB can import play counts (or any other fields not saved to file) from the iTunes xml file.
However i do recall it being stated that mediamonkey plugin doesnt work with all fields

Here's the thread and the script I used: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=31680#p162175

Here is a sample output from it: http://pastebin.com/M4JaRTnX

I should have read further into the thread because there is one last script along with a few user fixes in the comments following it: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=31680&start=60#p272344

Unfortunately, special and asian characters in directory paths and/or filenames didn't work with the script I used (first link).  I only tried to sync play counts and ratings (MB already read the later when I did a straight import).  For the files the script found, the playcounts and ratings synced fine and only 2300 out of 31300 files with playcounts failed to sync.  Not too bad.  Also, importing playcounts wiped out the last.fm playcount sync I did the other day, but in my case it didn't matter too much because they were close enough.

Also, autoplaylists from Mediamonkey didn't import (I didn't expect them to) and their output was saved as a regular playlist.

If someone wants to do this, I would recommend backing up Mediamonkey's database and ini files (and MusicBee's if someone already imported the files earlier like myself).  If one has a ton of autoplaylists, after backing up Mediamonkey's appdata directory, go back into Mediamonkey and delete all of those autoplaylists since they slow the script to a crawl.  Hope this info helps!