I apologize ahead of time if this is too long, but I'm a newbie to MusicBee and explaining why I like it requires telling how I got here... Like many others, I loved the revolutionary approach to digital music that Apple gave us with the iPod and iPhone, and enjoyed all of Steve Jobs's groundbreaking achievements, he truly blazed the trail to where we are. And like so many others I felt Apple's arrogance in the Jobs era and downright abandonment in the post-Jobs era where they have stopped caring about people's own music libraries and have become just another cloud music subscription service. I can't even start to describe how many countless hours iTunes's ignored bugs and ignored feature requests have taken from me in the last several years trying to keep my iTunes music library usable and accessible to my devices. My first step to liberate myself from Apple's arrogance and incompetence was to switch to a Galaxy S7, which I LOVE compared to iPhone's walled garden. Which left a conundrum because I still have a couple of iPods and my family is still hypnotized by Apple, so I can't quite yet dump Apple completely. I tried several other sync applications to get my music, ratings, and smart playlists on my S7 but they all had some deal breaker problem in them. Until I found MusicBee. Here are the main reasons this app has saved my music:
1) I can point it to my iTunes music folders, without dealing with the iTunes library, since MB has its own library. And when the day comes that I can get rid of iTunes, I can merely switch the music folder location.
2) When syncing to devices, you can tell it to retain the original folder structure.. this was a problem with other sync apps
that tried to create an Artist-based folder structure on the device, because I keep multiple Artists in some songs (such as in showtunes) that could have up to a dozen Artists in them separated in the Artist tag as artist1 / artist2 /artist3..etc. which can result in too-long of a folder name because iTunes (and many other apps) see this as one long Artist and it can't sync to the device because the path is too long. Thanks to MB's "preserve folders and filenames" option on device sync this problem went away.
3) MB will monitor my iTunes music folder for changes in the files and automatically sync their file tag changes to its own library. iTunes can't even do this reliably between its own files and library without manual intervention, a problem that has existed literally for YEARS.
4) Tag inspector displays not only the user-friendly tag name, but the actual 4-character mp3 frame ID.
5) Any TXXX-frame can be defined to MB as a Custom tag, and used in auto-playlists (big thumbs up here).
6) iTunes-like rating support, with option to keep rating only in MB's database. I don't use POPULARIMETER and instead keep rating in a TXXX-RATING tag, 1-5; I've found POPULARIMETER to be too weird and inconsistent to depend on across players and apps.
7) The ability to turn just about anything on and off - no arrogance from the developer, it's left to the user how they want their experience to be. I know making things configurable is not easy, so this is VERY appreciated!
6) Helpful and polite support on forum.
7) Quick response from Steven (the "guy"!) on bugs and feature requests.
Nice (BIG!) artist slideshows that auto-download artwork in the Now Playing window.
9) Lots of cool skins.
10) The app is feature-rich, works great, and is free!
This is the music-management app I recommend to EVERYONE. Keep rockin' Steven!!
