I just read 6 pages of the thread "Why I like Foobar..." WOW!! You guys are really sold on this thing! That's great. I haven't yet had time to absorb everything about it, but I have also heard some great things about MediaMonkey. Could someone briefly give me a pro/con between the two? Are they comparable?

My main need right now is ripping my 300+ CD collection to play from my computer as well as sync to a Creative Zen Vision M, and another portable player.

What do you all recommend?

(Hopefully I won't get "skinned" for even asking the question... )

First of all I wanted to say, that I'm using foobar2000 pretty long now and Media Monkey was just a little playing for me. So I can't tell you about all the functions and I surely missed some nice features

In my opinion foobar isn't that mighty in handling with portable players. For sure there's a plugin (sendtodevice) but I hadn't tried much around with it (and not for a long time). Personaly I prefer it, to select my Playlist / my Albums in foobar and just drop it onto my iAudio.

Ripping with foobar is no problem and it's pretty easy and fast. But I think that it's almost the same in MediaMonkey.

So for only those two arguments MM should be your choice. But there're so many more details such as how fast the software is (for me MM is far to lame, but maybe this was because of a crappy version).

You should mentioned what else you're searching.

Or you could just look at the MediaMonkey-Homepage and test the programm. There is a feature-list too. So it's not the big deal, to find out which program you prefer.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/product.htm

So long,
Horst

btw.

I think alien cats are well-disposed to a dancing monkey.

Depends on what you want.
Personally, I won't use MediaMonkey because I think the GUI is butt ugly.

But hey, whatever suits you.

foobar2000 is free.

I drag and drop files onto my Creative Zen Vision M in explorer. I haven't tried the send to device component (I should!).

Two arguments I had up in my sleeve (hope you know what I mean ).
I really hate the MM-Design, it's far too fancy and the hole playlist and the way to handle with them annoys me.

Btw. you can avoid some of the MM-restrictions by using a free encoder like lame. The developers point that out on their homepage. Anyway there're some more nice utilities which you can't use without the gold-license.

btw.
Instead of reading 6 pages you could find it out by "trial and error". Hopefully you'll use foobar.

1st: Foobar gives you control over your collection your way (if you understand titleformatting).
MM gives you control over your collection their way.

2nd: foobar isn't restricted if you compare ripping, converting and burning. MM is, unless you pay for it.

3d: foobar's UI is customizable so it can fit and adapt to your behaviour and likings.
MM's UI is customizable presetted, so it can adapt to the behaviour the MM-developers think you behave.

For playback, media monkey either uses DirectShow (no true gapless playback) or requires you to have Winamp installed.

Guess who wrote the playback backend for winamp (ten years ago)?
The lead dev of foobar2000, Peter Pawlowski.

I use foobar2000 because I've seen and experienced how tight the code Peter writes is.

I'm not sure how fast MediaMonkey is on large collections, but foobar2000 has been extensively tuned for them.

MediaMonkey doesn't allow for custom database queries (as far as I can tell) without paying for the Gold version.

There is no information or configuration that I can see about MediaMonkey's dither algorithm.

MediaMonkey does not appear to support either ASIO or kernel streaming.

Autoplaylists (a term that might have originated with foobar2000, though I'm not sure) are also not supported by MediaMonkey without shelling out cash.

MediaMonkey does not have anything like foo_facets.

There are a few.

According to the MM-Homepage MM can handle big collections with over 50.000 Tracks and it seems to me, that you can create Autoplaylists with MM too even without paying money. You only have more possibilietes to individualize your Lists with the Gold Version. MM also has (indirect) ASIO-support (read it in a forum). Btw. the term is maybe developed trough foobar2000 but so what? Anyways, would be interesting to know, who developed intelligent playlists at first.

Foo Facets? As far I can see MM has something like that.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2..._screenshot.png

Don't get me wrong, I'm loving foobar2000 and I couldn't imagine using MM. It just doesn't fit to me but I don't wanted to decry another program if it isn't deserve it (but guys, you can defame MM even so in challenges like the program speed or stupid handling at all ).

Cya

I'm sorry but that screenshot doesn't seem to show any behavior in MediaMonkey that is similar to foo_facets.

Maybe the screenshot doesn't, but MM does have an iTunes (Winamp3)-esque 3-pane-view.

Now does it doesn't seem to be as fast, or have multiple columns or any of the other advanced features foo_facets has, but it could certainly be called similar.

mm is slow here with my small (6652 files) library
mm can't secure rip...
mm freeze...
mm isn't free...

Simply being limited makes MediaMonkey bad IMO. It's okay, but foobar is for my needs perfect.

If your main need is ripping, I wouldn't use Foobar or MediaMonkey. I use Exact Audio Copy (with Mareo) for ripping.

Then your choice is simply which piece of software plays music best, and for that I've chosen Foobar.

Isn't the "Bibliotheek" (dutch is a stupid language ) comparable to foo_facets? It's not expanded at the Shot but at least it should have (more or less) the same functionality or has facets some fancy special features I'm not aware off?

I have to admit, that I used MM only for a short time and maybe imagine myself some features.

So long,
Horst

edit:
shakey_snake seems to support my answer.

Bibliotheek is the same as Library (origin of bibliotheek is greek, biblio=books and theek or theque=collection).

The main difference between facets and that in MM is that foobar has the advantage of titleformatting new facetcolumns. For example, i have a facet that starts with date added.

To be honest, i used MM before foobar. MM is great too when it comes to organizing. The main thing is that MM at first glance seems to have much more features.

Then I didn't realize that foobar had more features then just showing a playlist in a sober panel. Even today, after using foob for more then a year now, I discover new features in it.

Foobar is the best library/musicmanager I know, but the learning curve for using all functions right is kinda steep and much features are hidden at first use.

Thanks for the explanation of the term but I'm from Germany so I understand most of the dutch language.
Just a little rivalry between Germans and Dutch men just right to the voetbal-EM / Fußball-EM.



For sure Title Formating is much more powerful than any preformatted clobber. But isn't MM able to handle with various expressions like "title contains *XYZ*" or "playtime is higher than *Number*" and the second one combined with another rule like "and date is newer than 2007"?




We agree in this point except the factor, that I used Winamp and was with the time more and more disappointed and heared that foobar2000 has much more features and cool ideas. At least I have to admit, that I was firstly disappointed by foobar too. Just looks a little bit too table-like and at the first glance I couldn't see nice or important features whose could make me move to foobar. However, you need time and fun with playing around to get onto the foobar-trip even it could be a little bit hard for some people.

There are so many things unlogical with that statement, that i dont even know where to start.


That depends.... formatting/programming languages which strive to be similiar to common english aesthetically, are a two sided sword. On first sight, they are impressive and SEEM more easy.... until you notice how important PREDICTABILITY is. When a language begins to be very similiar to common english, then the difference between that language and english SEEMS to fade - which also means that you start having difficulty to distinguish between the two. The problem now is that such a programming language is NOT english - it only understands certain sentence-structures and certain keywords.... its still just a normal programming language with a syntax with gives the illusion of it being english. At that point, it becomes difficult to predict what kind of code will work and what kind of code will not work - because the language seems like english and you start asuming that any valid english sentence will work - but it wont work, because it isn't english... it just looks like that. This problem becomes worse, the more complex the language becomes and the more features it gets.

For a really nice example of "aesthetic programming languages" going wrong, check out Inform7 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#The_In...amming_language )

I prefer foobar2000 to MM because of the many panels.ui stilish interfaces you can apply to It. With exception of Beoplayer from Bang and Olufssen, wich have the best user interface in the world, no other audioplayer can compare with foobar2000 in this aspect.

Ys,
Rozzo

Ookay. I use Foobar as my player, but MediaMonkey for tagging tweaks and such.
People will tell you for hours about the advantages of Foobar, but ths pros for MM are (to me):
- Intuitive (more or less) - hardly any learning curve needed.
- All (well, all FREE, that is) features come out-of-the-box - no need for forums and such
- Handles embedded & non-embedded album art perfectly & simply
- Auto-queries FreeDB (only for AudioCDs) - like all players except Foobar (after version 0.8.3)
- Amazon info lookups and suchlike (for tagging+album art)
- The best power-feature: "Files to Edit" - automatically seeks duplicate files (regardless of tags), files with missing tag fields, Multiple-Artist albums and much more.

cons:
- horriffic interface
- slow loading times
- mp3 and other encodings require premium version
- no proper help for their scripting language (yep - there is one)
- Tends to mess up some tags (duplicates %date% fields - at least that's what Foobar sees)
- Has an irritating tendency to over-automate tag changes. Kind of tries to think for you - which I dislike.
- more album-oriented than single file-oriented (I can't find a good way to explain it)

It was only an example on my side for MediaMonkey. I know that foobar2000 Titleformating is "harder" to learn than clicking trough 5 menues and making your list that way. I only said, that fbar is more powerful not easier. But with spending a little bit time you can handle with it.

Btw. "zweiseitiges Schwert" is called "double-edged sword".

I've used both foobar and MM for a few years now.

I used foobar for a while because it gave me near-absolute control (having been a programmer this mattered to me). After a while I became tired of foobar's UI and looked around for something minimally functional (most of us don't need many features in an audio ripper/player, we're just very fussy about the features we do want) and a bit more pleasant to look at (and yes, I did try just about every UI component out there for foobar)...

...and I came across MediaMonkey and have used it ever since - I never removed foobar from my PC by the way.

I am now very seriously considering going back to foobar. The new UI capabilities are important to me, and I do miss the control I used to have.

Software is somewhere between a tool and a toy most of the time. Different people want for different features in software. I wouldn't pretend to suggest which of foobar or MM would be best for anyone I didn't know well, but I would be inclined to suggest MM for non-techos who just want to rip/encode/listen to music.

If only one could start with a generic foobar installation, customise (that's not a typo in New Zealand) it, and re-package it for easy distribution, many non-techos would be able to actually use it...

Aren't those "ready-set-go"-packages forbidden? If they're, can someone explain me the reason? I would love to share configurations but as far as I know I'm not allowed to do it.

The New Default UI has a Quick Appearance Setup feature. This is, practically speaking, exactly what you are talking about.

Without prior written permission, yes.

Support hell. This was allowed before 0.9, then the license was changed to prevent it.

You can share your configuration you just need to get the permission of an third-party component authors who's component you plan on redistributing, and it can't included any part of foobar2000 in the installer, without Peter's written permission.


-------------------
BTW, I've ben playing with it since this thread appeared. Other than clicking column headers, does Media Monkey have any sorting features?
Count that as +1 for foobar2000, which has about twice as many sorting options as any other media player I've ever seen.

One more reason for that limitation may be, that in the past, this possibility was abused for defamation purposes.

I'm awared of it, that giving other people my config is allowed, was written a little bit cloudy by myself. However, especially for Panels_UI-Users it's very uncomfortable to use "packages" like br3tt's. I think it could make foobar more popular but this could have bad by-effects like it happened to WinAmp. Otherwise there would be more developers. Anyways, if foobar is getting developed constantly I'm happy enough.

MM is extremely customisable for those that can/want to use SQL and VBScript.

See: http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Scripting

For look and feel for out-of-box users there are many scripts (see: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic...5e34bf73fe1787) and a few MM skins (http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Skins_for_MediaMonkey_v3.0_and_higher) but, apparently, any winamp skin can be used.

I have recreated my Foobar customisations in MM with little difficulty (once I got back up-to-speed with SQL and VBS)! It was easier than setting up Foobar in many ways as different parts of the config. communicate.

I have not found it necessary to upgrade to the paid version of MM.

Nice to have some alternative... Tagging is much better with drop-down selection/entry from almost anywhere track(s) are displayed.

Wow, didn't know that.

SQL & foobar2000 is definitely a toy I'd like to play with!

Alessandro

Honestly, if you primarily used foobar because of panels UI's "interface customization ability" you were barking up the wrong tree to begin with.

How hard it was to setup something like someone else's should have been your first clue.

@shakey_snake: The New Default UI has a Quick Appearance Setup feature. This is, practically speaking, exactly what you are talking about.

Actually, No. I'm was referring to more than just UI components for packaging.

There's really not much point. foobar2000's database is not relational. It consists of one table, with one row per file (or track), with arbitrary field names, and is highly optimized to take advantage of its unique structure. Using a SQL backend or a SQL query language would serve no purpose and would probably be less efficient than the current structure.

Yes, I was suspecting foobar2000 data structures are not RDBMS-based, so mine was more the expression of a dream rather than a request.

SQL might be handy for grouping, gathering statistics, filtering and things like that, but I understand it's probably something that doesn't fit in the current architecture.

Alessandro

Hmm... Facets has statistics that leverages the current database structure, and it performs REALLY well. So I doubt that the architecture is preventing any features.

If you've ever used the album list, you'll realize that foobar2000 has found an equivalent that probably outperforms the SQL query technique and is much lighter and user-friendly in terms of user configuration. Title-formatting-based grouping and queries are quick, effective, and easy to understand. That saves on stuff like this:



Long table is long.

Also, try pulling all songs added in the past week out of that table structure. Oh wait, that data isn't stored. And there's no place to store it. Install one component in foobar2000 and you're golden.

Edit: Post was made before the requisite morning dose of caffeine and thus contained minor, if someone silly, errors.

I can't disagree, it was like banging my head against a brick wall - but it feels really good now I have stopped!

I meant the current architecture prevents the usage of SQL, not the collection of those data. And Facets is a great tool indeed, but if you use ColumnsUI...

Anyway, all my "ranting" is probably due to the fact that I feel more comfortable setting up an SQL query than fiddling with foobar scripting language (let alone write a plugin in C). Not that I'm expecting to see a RDBMS for foobar any time soon...

Alessandro

Customizable to the max.

$if3($if($stricmp(%genre%,Classical),%composer%,),%band%)

That's a just View you can have using Facets UI.

Why? What makes my opinion illogical? I don't like using shareware, and a program that wants you to pay for the full feature set yet still has the menu entries for the options and features that are off limits isn't one that I want to use. If they took everything that had to be paid for out of the free version then it would be a lot better. Besides, it's for my needs bloated. Foobar does what I need it to do.