I noticed there are several users in the forum who uses Media Jukebox instead Winamp. In fact, this player/encoder/burner is growing and it has been rated 5 stars in cd-rw.org. I'm not qualified at all to review or compare such a program, so I was wondering if any of you have an opinion about it.
Should winamp and foobar users consider this alternative? cd-rw.org says so: "Watch out WinAmp – The Media Jukebox is coming!".
I must say its features are impressive.

First of all, MJ v8 supports Winamp input, DSP Plugin...With the newest MJ v9...I think it supports Winamp output plugin too.

Great Media library!

compared with foobar Media Jukebox 8 not have the function "replaygain scan_as_album" and replaygain does not work with the mp3's...

compared with EAC rip function of Media Jukebox is slower...

and it cost 25 dollars!

Hey emtee i use MediaJukebox for a long time ago and nothing compare to this software, MC 9 is looking better than MJ 8 give it a try is the only way to find if you like it or no.
Also MJ gives a 30 days trial.

MC 9
http://www.mediajukebox.com/mediacenter/

And a comparation btw MJ8 and MC9
http://www.musicex.com/mediajukebox/comparison.html

There are two versions available. The newer Media Center 9 (still in beta) and Media Jukebox 8. MC plays audio, video, dvds, TV, as well as images...more of an all around multimedia player. MJ is an audio only jukebox. MC was recently re-written to support unicode, which for some reason, among the various bugs of beta software, broke compatibility with it's currently existing MPC plug-ins.* Once MC9 final is released, MJ8 will be updated to use the newer MC code, but will still remain an audio only product.




MJ and Winamp and Foobar are not really interchangeable. I think one of the reasons people use Winamp and Foobar is because they are small, quick loading and don't use a lot of system resources. Their primary goal is playback of audio and they do it very well. Don't get me wrong, MJ also plays back audio very well, but in IMHO, it's strongest feature is it's organizational and sorting abilities, which is very nice if you have thousands of unmanageable audio files on your hard drive and it's light years beyond the capabilities of any other jukebox software.



You can use Winamp 2.x plug-ins to gain playback (no encoding or tagging) funtionality for the 2 or 3 formats that MJ doesn't support (AAC, FLAC, ?).



MJ has a built in Replay Gain analyzation tool that is based on the original Replay Gain specs. It currently only works in Radio Gain mode. It saves the gain info to the tags and is used when the Replay Gain DSP is enabled during playback. Unfortunatley, MJs RG tags are only usable by MJ. It works with all formats that are supported by MJ.



On my system (PIII733, 256ram, Plextor 12/10/32a) with MJ set to use it's Secure Digital mode, ripping speeds are pretty much equal to that of EAC secure ripping.



Yes it does, but you are getting features that generally aren't available in freeware players. If all you want to do is playback audio and create simple playlists, keep using Winamp and Foobar. For me, though, MJs amazing sorting and playlist abilities (far beyond anything Musicmatch can do) let me listen to my music in a whole new way. I can honestly say that I haven't enjoyed listening to my music this much in years.

Here are some of what I think are the best features:

-Create complex View Schemes that sort on any tag field (very similar to Musicmatch, only better).
-Create regular Playlists (.m3u) that can be exported and used by any player.
-Create complex Smartlists based on tag info that automatically populate themselves as new files are added to the database. For example, you could create a Smartlist that could choose a random 1 hour selection of Electronica tracks that haven't been played for the past 60 days.
-Can be configured to use an external encoder (just like EAC).
-Supports reading/writing ID3v1 and/or Id3v2 for MP3, APE 1.0 for Monkey's Audio and MPC, Vorbis tags for Ogg Vorbis.

Anyway, those are just a few reasons why I use MJ.

Rob

PS - Oh and best of all, it has this button on the toolbar that will copy the currently playing track info to the clipboard so you can paste it here, like this:

Listening to: 'Life Is A Lemon And I Want My Money Back (Remix)' from 'The Very Best Of Meat Loaf' by 'Meat Loaf' on Media Center


*The person who was writing and maintaining the plug-ins is no longer doing so, but MPC support will be restored before MC9 final is released.

You get what you pay for.

rocketsauce-

You covered just about everything that MJ has to offer. There are other things as well.

EXAMPLE: ASIO output for soundcards that support such things. It's in there.

emtee-

I have been using MJ for nearly a year now. I tried others but this is the one that has amazed me since day one. It burns, rips, encodes, converts, gets track info, etc., etc. While you get a lot of people saying 'bloatware', what else do you use the computer for anyways? Email, and checkbook balancing? It isn't that bad on a box that is nearly 6 years old, in my case. For $25.00 you get a heck of a lot of program. Try it and see for yourself.

Listening to: 'Rinse:Repeat' from 'Holy Shit' by 'Betzefer' on Media Jukebox

Courtesy of zevele

Winamp & fb2k obviously load much faster than MJ8 /MC9 but something funny is that both Winamp and fb2k uses more RAM than MJ.

fb2k and Winamp2 uses ~9MB of RAM but MJ only uses ~4MB of RAM.

MJ uses 0-1 % of CPU for playback without DSP
With EQ & Replay Gain on, it still uses 0-1% of CPU and ~4MB of RAM
+ Effects only 5% of CPU, ~5MB RAM

The EQ is very great for low bitrate music and I can't find any better EQ than MJ. The Shibatch EQ in fb2k, MUSICMATCH EQ, Winamp EQ craps and uses more CPU. High and Low are balanced with MJ EQ.

Excellent crossfading!
Up to 32 bit Output with Direct Sound/WaveOut/Disk Writer
The skins and UI is not as good as Winamp, WMP, but much better than fb2k. You can also use Winamp skins for MJ.

If you bought some winamps DSP, you can even use it with MJ, it helps to save some bugs to purchase other softwares!

the price USD 25.++..... is reasonable.
Unlike MUSICMATCH USD 19.++ is expensive with it's useless MP3 Encoder and Decoder and bad mp3>CD burning


My system:
P4 1.4 MHz
256MB PC800 RDRAM

What about VM size? (Task Manager, Processes tab, View menu, Select Columns..., Virtual Memory Size)

VM size and Mem Usage appear to be separate, rather than either field including the total of both. Seems to make sense, actually.

Not sure what to think with some things, though. I'll see my browser using 38.5MB of memory, but 34MB VM size. Whether memory usage includes VM remains to be seen, as I've also seen Mem Usage go down when an application such as Foobar2000 is minimized, while the VM size remains about the same.

Anyone else care to shed some light on this, or am I derailing the topic here?

MJ will sure uses more VM than the tiny fb2k with it's features! But VM is not so important, what important is that it uses less physical Memory!

Edit: MJ has an excellent mp3 decoder, something Nero does not have it until now!

How did you came to this conclusion? I downloaded MJ 8.0 just to test this, and here it uses 14MB of physical memory and additionally over 16MB of virtual memory when minimized and playing one MPC file. Foobar2000 consumes 1.6MB of physical memory and 9.5MB virtual memory for the same task. Note that I had all my mp3 + mpc files in playlist with both players.

I've just tried it.
it looks pretty confusing at first sight, and not very stable (it "generated errors and will be closed by windows" [using win2k SP3 on a PIII 800, 256 RAM]). But since you guys say it rocks, instead of unninstalling it immediatelly, i'm gonna give it another try.



However, some questions still remain:

1) As far as I'm concerned, Winamp and Foobar2000 are the best mp3 and general media players around. Is Media Jukebox superior, or at least as good decoding audio? Are there any listening tests?

2) IMHO, the biggest flaw in winamp 2 (and even bigger in winamp3) is that it doesn't support folders on Playlist. This would greatly improve playlist organization for those who arrange their albums in folders, and even for those who don't, if creating Virtual Directories on playlist would be possible. Now, MJ certainly includes features other freeware players don't, does it fills this lack every player has? I don't know even 1 player wich supports it.

NOTE: It is possible to add folders to winamp's 2.xx playlist using a plugin called Advanced Winamp Playlist. However it is very buggy, unstable, only displays mp3 and its development stopped I can say it is the reason why I still use winamp 2 instead of 3, so I can organize my playlist decently.
The picture attached is a screenshot of my current winamp using this plugin, posted just in case a winamp developer drops by this post and decide to implement this feature in winamp 3

Disable skining might help?
or Are you using MC9 Beta?

Don't you worry about the MP3 decoder, it's an excellent one and it's based of FhG source like Winamp if I'm right!

About Mp3 decoder of MediaJukebox

http://mp3decoders.mp3-tech.org/decoders_mjb.html

Overall mp3 decoder comparison

http://mp3decoders.mp3-tech.org/overall.html

Might want to try a reboot as well. Used to run Win98SE, and for whatever reason, it happened alot when a new build was installed. Found out that a reboot usually cured the initial error problems I was getting. XP seems more forgiving in this respect, and most times I do not have to go through this step.

As far as folders in a playlist. I don't believe it is possible with MJ-MC either. You may want to try and post over on MJ's forum as well. There are many creative users who could have found a way to get something similar done.

Just a thought...

I can add another reason to consider MJ8/MC9: portable audio devices. With its file management abilities and smartlists it is a breeze to move files back and forth. For example, you can set it to automatically send files you have recently encoded, files you haven't listened to in 6 months, or files you just downloaded and want to decide whether to go and buy the CD. I still use Foobar when I know exactly what I want to listen to, but I am finding myself turning to MC more and more. Granted, it does have a bit of a learning curve, but its manageable.