"Play Anything" by Matthew P. Graven.
PC Magazine - February 4, 2003.
Yesterday (Jan. 14, 2003) I received February's edition of PC magazine. An article which reviews the following media players caught my attention: Media Jukebox 8.0, MusicMatch Jukebox 7.5, QuickTime 6, RealOne Player 2.0, Winamp 3 and Windows Media Player 9. I was displeased to see my favorite media player, Media Jukebox, received an unimpressive 3/5 bullets, while RealOne and MusicMatch tied for editor's choice with 4/5 bullets.
In 1996, my first MP3 player was Winamp; I was always looking for a more full-featured application so I moved to Real Jukebox Plus version 1 when it was released and then upgraded to version 2. Once Real discontinued Real Jukebox, I research all the players on the market, even looking at Winamp again and settled on the best one I found - Media Jukebox.
Looking at the two players that beat out Media Jukebox in the PC Magazine article, it is so easy to dismiss MusicMatch. MusicMatch has the most difficult to use interface of any player out there, after two days of trial use I could not get it to do what I intended. For instance, I found it impossible to organize my large music library by Genre/Artist/Album.
RealOne v2 is a good product, if you could stop the marketing blitz that comes along with it. If anyone experimented with RealOne v1, you will remember that Real wanted to charge you $10 a month to use the product. I am glad they have changed their 'tune' and sell the product outright for $20. Even with this correction, Real is a company which I have a distain for because of their questionable and possibly unethical previous marketing methods.
In conclusion, Matthew P. Graven does not know the first thing about judging media players. A high level of functionality coupled with ease of use is the two most important criteria. The only competition for Media Jukebox is iTunes, and that cost about $1600 (including hardware).