Amazing. Been using iTunes since the 4th Gen iPod came out. Not because I'm a fan of the company (never been) but because well...who didn't own a 40GB player at the time? I have had major library disasters because I simply didn't know how the p.o.c. program worked. It took hours of time and organization so that it could be turned into fully fledged disasters. Then over the years I realized how it never acted like a proper player by "monitoring" a specifically given folder as the base minimum feature one expects a media player to have, let alone a proper database system instead of some crippled linear xml file as it's organizer. Despite these headaches and the lack of iPod support from other players, more and more players over time started to support the iPod. Now why the iPod? Well that's a whole new story. Tell me one player out there that gives me mass storage in my pocket, hardware controls and basic DAP for my needs? Despite today having touchy touch fanciness, and lack of storage (typically the boring 8, 16, 32 blah blah sequence), no other player competes with the iPod as a true jukebox player. Now, wanting to shift my library towards something intelligent and fully featured (since years ago, no time or dedication), it was time to move towards the Winamp/foobar/Mediamonkey/<insert gtk related player> territory. When this happened iTunes 11 was announced, LOL, how pathetic is to release pointless features and yet NOT solve the long term problem it has, yet many argue it all over the forums how "simple" and "effective" it is, oh wait, I'm weird. Anyways, one of the strongest players that had always been installed in my pc for years was Winamp. Thing is I personally don't like to use a program that crashes, builds memory and lacks many library customizations, views, usability, let alone handled by AOL, but I wasn't going to discontinue my use over it because of one undeniable feature, Gracenote access). I then started installing the most attractive players with the features that was effective for me under the wiki comparison page [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_player_software]. Of course these lists will never fulfill the little details that one catches if you don't actually install it yourself and play with it. About a handful of the total players available, foobar2000 indefinitely was one of my top picks, as a matter of fact it has been my player for my separate "flacs" for a couple of months already, but my main goal was to move my main .mp3 library away from iChunes to 2 or 3 players simultaneously. Along the installation tests, MusicBee was certainly tested but somehow I uninstalled it...
have no idea why but I was not in an open minded mood or discovery at the time. Later tests using other gtk like players which are certainly superior to iTunes, weren't fulfilling as I had already been using foobar2000 and Winamp. Mediamonkey eventually overcame the test and it was used as my third player to transfer, organize and possibly tag. I finally did the shift by using foobar2000 extensively and Winamp's proper "library scanninng" engine and I have never felt so secured and calm by fiddling with my library so much without having the fear of seeing exclamation point everywhere and broken xml files all over. Once the transfer was done I noticed Winamp doesn't automatically reflect changed upon changes done to the songs, one has to re-scan or something. foobar2000 is another glorious player, does everything how one wants it, certainly not gui friendly but it ain't a cli player. From here on, I accomplished my goal from moving away from the bloated player, but now my other heavy tasks was to mas tag everything in such "masochist" order. Now there was nothing out of order under iTunes either, the tagging I do is quite strict and organization is highly important as I am more of a "tagger" than a "folder" user. As an Electronic Genre listener, the access to Discogs is KEY and high priority, period. So by using mp3Tag a lot and Gracenote under Winamp for detailed tagging of unknowns, track xx, and other goodness is highly important, this is why I continue to keep Winamp as they are a licensed Gracenote client, along with iTunes with the exception that it must be songs imported from a CD and not the drag and dropped music files, LOL again. From here on I noticed how with much use, Mediamonkey was starting to become quite not my priority player, though not certainly a bad player since it does rank highly among others. Continuing on with my tagging and organization and eventually duplicated/backed up across a NAS, I eventually decided to give MusicBee a go once again since some random forum post in [http://techsupportalert.com] mentioned MusicBee 2.0 released and wow, simply amazing. It covers everything that I need, customization very high, and vast amounts of tagging, portable, auto folder organization, something foobar doesn't have but their plugin "file operations" is definitely useful and heck, everything else. I think I have now settled my search and use of a -proper player- that runs light. Dev and team working on this player, I would like to extend my appreciation on such program of high caliber. Thanks.
