FileForum Reviews of Helium Music Manager 2005

Review

ninjeratu	Apr 25, 2005	Build 4536	3 out of 5	It's good looking and has lots of features, for sure, but has some annoying problems that _should_ have been stamped out in betatests. Surely SOMEONE betatesting had more than 5-6 MP3 albums? The #1 annoying thing is the import album function. Import a Various Artists folder and Helium can, for no appearant reason, create new albums and add some songs to these. Presumably it searches the net for a song-album match and add the song to the found album, though I have never allowed this. If you're importing many folders this might actually be difficult to correct since the annoying interface in Helium makes absolutely NO use of actual file folders and you might not know which Album a single MP3 belongs to .. That's why they're saved in folders, you moronic program! The GUI is often annoying and counter intuitive. Often the most used commands are hidden in menues while your screen is filled with useless information about the song currently playing and whatnot. Somewhere a beta tester should have pointed out that adding easily clickable buttons for stuff like "Browse album in Album Browser" would be a good thing, not hidden in menues. And, yes, you CAN customize toolbars and stuff. It's just that you're flooded with menues, commands and panes. You'll sooner quit the program in pure frustration than customize everything to your liking. Another winning annoyance is that it's almost impossible to prevent Helium from writing ID-tags to your MP3s .. which it does whenever you change or add something. Move an MP3 from one album to another (see above) and it need to update and write tags to all files in the album. Do this with a large MP3 collection for a while and you have thousands of fragmented files.. And a fragmented mind .. as often a single update can take a couple of seconds .. when all you wanted to do was change an Album name that the import function didn't get. Since Helium actually uses a database to store stuff in this should never happen. Leave my MP3s alone, thank you. Stupid program. The last major annoyance is the "Search for an album cover" function using the Amazon plugin. (There are other search plugins you can use). It's nice, though it rarely finds an actual cover. And you cannot ignore Not Found errors .. Try downloading covers for 20 albums and you'll probably end upp clicking Cancel 19 times. Most annoying. Some of the other search plugins actually do find covers from time to time, but more often than not nothing gets downloaded anyway. You might as well Google for the album covers yourself. Minor annoyances include the included audioplayer that is just a bar at the bottom of the page. It's way too small to be useful. You often press stop instead of skip forward. Which leads to another minor annoyance. If you use Winamp as your player and add an album to the play queue .. only the current song will be enqueued in Winamp. You have to press next song in _Helium_ if you wish to skip song. Even playlists refuse to queue all songs in Winamp. Helium is probably a media manager done by consensus, not by anyone actually using it daily with huge collections of MP3s. Too many flashy, pointless functions that are frustrating to use and too few easily used, simple and intuitive functions. It's got huge potential, though.
MentholMoose7	Nov 25, 2004	1.8	5 out of 5	Best Music Management on the market!
fredrikkarlsson	Sep 19, 2003	1.7.2	5 out of 5	The bug listed below in version 1.6 is solved in version 1.7. I was also a bit sceptic about this program at first, but I must say that version 1.7 is a real hit. These guys certainly know what they are doing.
Synapse Syndrome	Apr 23, 2003	1.6 Build 2865	3 out of 5	I would say that this is a very good program, but it doesn't work with mutli-user 2000/XP systems. It can only be run from the administrator account that it was installed on, and even then it screws with all other accounts (when you right click anything it tries to reinstall itself). Other than that it's a great program and I hope that these bugs will be sorted out soon.
maria@citymob.nu	Feb 24, 2003	1.21	5 out of 5	This program helps a lot when having lots of mp3 files scattered all over your hard discs and on CD-R's. I have very good control of my music.
adamsandler	Jan 15, 2003	1.21	5 out of 5	I like Helium very much. I have been a registered user since version 1.6, and they have been making really good progress on the features and interface