MP3's

Music Match Jukebox 7.0

A lot of us gaming enthusiasts are big music fans, there can be no doubt about it. There are a lot of different apps out there to help you get the most from your music collection, but I prefer the all-in-one approach when possible, if for no other reason than consistency. Having been at this for years, I have tested a bunch of offerings, but find that Music Match Jukebox has historically been one of the very best tools for MP3 Enthusiasts.

With version 4.3 and later, Music Match switched to the Fast Fraunhofer encoder, which is hailed by many as the best bit-independent MP3 encoder around. Yes, Lame may be better in some circumstances, but unless you are a rabid audio freak who has to have the absolute best in a single bit rate, the Fast Fraunhofer encoder will rule the roost. Besides, if you are that uptight about it, you should encode at 320 bit anyway and forget about the compression part.

As I was saying, Music Match had done a great job, and with version 5.x they really hit their stride. But their 6.x version has been universally panned as a buggy, Java-dependent mess, and rightfully so. Luckily, their newest release, version 7.x is now out, and it seems to have fixed just about all the big bugs and thrown a ton of great new features into the bundle. I decided to take the update on a shakedown cruise.

All Aboard The MP3 Express!

The Eggplant Skin

Tag Editing

Powerful Renaming

The screen on the left shows the visually appealing interface, which can be resized and moved as you please. It is a snap to view by artist, album, track and more should you want to adjust the sort order. As it turns out, I have some 300+ store bought CD's that have about 4,200 songs on them. I took the time to DAE (Digital Audio Extract) all of these files to 160 bit MP3's on my 40 gigabyte hard drive so that I could create and listen to custom playlists on my thumping speaker set. All that was back in the 5.x era. However, I got a fast cd-rw drive with Burn-Proof and Easy CD Creator 5 and found I really, really liked how easy it was to create custom audio cd's using Easy CD's interface. But as far as I could find, Easy CD did not allow for identification and sorting by track, only by title, so if I wanted to drag and drop some MP3 files to be burned as CDA, I had to manually order the tracks as they appeared on the original CD.

It turns out Music Match 7 has this new "Super Tagging" feature that allows all kinds of flexibility in changing tag or file name information for one or more songs. So, on a whim, I selected every single song in my file library, chose to edit the tag and execute a mass renaming. With just a few clicks, I was able to tell the program to add the track number to the existing file name with a separator of my choosing using their "Create Filename From Tags" feature and it processed all 4,200 or so of my songs in about 20 minutes on my 1.2ghz AMD setup. It had 35 'errors' where it got confused when it found an original song was duplicated on a greatest hits disk, but those were quickly fixed. The center and right images above give some indication of how tag renaming works. With features like this and the ability to burn custom CD's and DVD's and print out jewel cases with up to 150 tracks listed on them, version 7 looks to be a winner. Check it out at: www.musicmatch.com.