Just wanted to say that I just wrote about Media Jukebox in a blog entry where I gave it a glowing review. I simply cannot live with it now, period.
Here's what I wrote:
JRiver Media Jukebox (free) (music librarian) - This is also a free software, but has no limited to usage and completely free. The Media Jukebox is essentially the “lite” version of JRiver’s Media Center, which does all media types like video and images and internet TV…etc. The Jukebox is just the music portion of Media Center, and for me, that’s really all I need since I don’t have too much use for a video and image librarian. I use ACDSee Pro in conjunction with XnView (freeware) for my image librarian and I haven’t really felt the need for a video librarian just yet, but I may, since I keep downloading youtube videos of musical performances and it starts to get confusing when there are too many of them. I think I’d at least want a star-rating system for my video collection. If you know a nice freeware that can do it, please contact me.
Oh yeah, back to why I love Media Jukebox. First of all, it’s free, and that’s amazing considering how freaking powerful and efficient and fast it is. I have gone through all the main music librarians that techie geeks rave about–foobar, Winamp, Jet Audio, Deliplayer, itunes, Quintessential Player, Windows Media Player, Creative Play Center, Real One, dBpowerAMP–you name it, I probably have tested it. My main criteria for a good music librarian are the following:
-Number of file formats recognized
-Most flexible sorting methods and search options (by filepath, genre, artist, album, duration, bitrate, file type, rating, replay gain, custom field…etc)
-Advance features (volume match, track information display, tag editing, BPM analyzation, smart playlists, customization of view and color scheme…etc)
-Fast response when searching, navigating various screens, sorting huge collections, operating playback controls…etc.
-Reliable. No crashes and no glitches.
-Intuitive. Does not require digging into the help files to learn about its features.
Over the years, the only software that contained most of the features and qualities I’m after was JRiver’s Media Center, and when they released the free version, Media Jukebox, I jumped on it, since I never went as far as to buy Media Center as I didn’t need all its other features outside of music. Media Jukebox is very flexible, powerful, and reliable depending on what’s on your machine (I have it installed on two machines, and on one of them it’s rock solid, and on the other it’s flaky and crashes often, but I’m pretty sure it’s because of the machine). J. river’s products contain all the features and qualities I listed above, and I just can’t stand using anything else now that I’ve gotten so used to the speed, power, and all those features. If you are serious about your music collection, you owe it to yourself to give JRiver Media Jukebox or Media Center a spin–they’ll most likely convert you into a loyal user.