Musicmatch Jukebox 10

 Musicmatch Jukebox 10
REVIEW DATE:  12.08.04

Total posts: 6

By Troy Dreier

The new Musicmatch Jukebox 10 (the first release since Yahoo! purchased the company) delivers incremental improvements to an already strong music manager. Whereas Microsoft's Windows Media Player 10 branched out to help you organize all types of media files, MMJ 10 sticks to its knitting, delivering mostly ease-of-use refinements designed to help music lovers better organize and play their collections. The result: While WMP 10 arguably has the edge for casual users (and for those who will use its multimedia capabilities), MMJ 10 is our favorite for music lovers looking for the most robust audio manager.

Unlike WMP 10 and RealPlayer, which aim to help you manage all your digital media, MMJ 10 (which runs only under Windows XP) focuses on audio. It does not aspire to organize and play your entire multimedia library (music, photos, videos); it's trying to be the best music-management solution for serious enthusiasts. And it succeeds, handling enormous music

libraries impressively. Working with a collection that contained more than 100,000 tracks, MMJ 10 was just as responsive as it was with small collections. Organizing your music is easy, with more tagging options (including a full set of ten new tags for classical music). And we love the new drag-and-drop tagging (a feature also found in WMP 10), which lets you change mistagged songs simply by dragging them into the correct folder.

One new feature is the completely revamped AutoDJ tool. With it, you select a few artists to build a playlist around, set the controls for how much variety and how many songs you want, and let the program do the rest. If you subscribe to Musicmatch's fantastic On Demand service, which lets you stream all the music you want (from the service's 800,000-track library) for $7.95 per month ($95.40 per year), the AutoDJ can even include On Demand content. This is a great way to discover new music. Fans of the previous AutoDJ tool, which uses filters to create playlists, will find that it's been improved and is now called AutoDJ Classic.

Other improvements include new library views, a handy tool for managing your playlists, faster CD ripping and burning in the free version (8x burning and 10x ripping are now supported), and an option to filter out explicit lyrics from the online services. There aren't many new features exclusive to the premium version. Jukebox Plus ($19.99) does, however, include a tool for finding duplicate tracks; it also supports custom library views and lets you export your library to a spreadsheet.

But MMJ 10 might not be right for everyone. Some will prefer WMP 10's Explorer-like tree menu to MMJ's drop-down menus. Accessing different views or the various controls is also easier in WMP 10, thanks to the tree menu and a tabbed interface. And while WMP 10 is no replacement for a dedicated photo-management application such as Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0, those with modest photo-organizational needs (or a Portable Media Center to sync with) might prefer to use WMP 10 as their sole app. Also, WMP 10 users can easily shop from MSN Music and Napster within the player, while MMJ 10 users can choose only Musicmatch's store from within the player.

Still, MMJ 10 makes an already good jukebox even better. It has the most depth in music organization of any jukebox out there. If all you want is a way to organize and play music, you'll be very pleased.

Member Ratings

bostmaguy July 18, 2005 Member rating:

The "editors" of PC Mag must be out to lunch. Not only have I, a technically savvy geek, found the interface complicated and overwhelming, when iTunes for Windows was made available, I felt like I entered Valhalla. It even prompted me to purchase a Mac for home and roll out Macs to "test" departments at work. Now everyone wants to be in a test group. Well, testing ends shortly and we will be doing a systemwide rollout based on my recommendations. All of this happened because I was looking for a better way to manage my music, and the waterfall effect kicked in.

  

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tgalang July 12, 2005 Member rating:

Based on Troy's Dreier article, I decided to purchase Musicmatch 10.0 Plus for $19.95. It was money poorly spent. They claim to only have technical support for Plus users, yet they have no phone number, do not reply to emails (I'm still waiting for two responses from emails sent 6/27 and 6/29 - it's 7/12 right now), and their online help is full of errors. They also refused to refund downloaded music in the following two situations: I had an error downloading three songs ($0.99 each) and for two and a half weeks they wouldn't download. I went to Real and purchased the songs there. After I debugged the problem myself (no help from Musicmatch) when I wanted to download more songs, these old songs finally downloaded. Their billing department couldn't care less that I had purchased them from Real, or that I had to wait 2-1/2 weeks to get the songs. They just wanted their $3. Two other songs that I downloaded will not burn to a CD with the error "No burn rights". Even though I can't get any technical support to fix this, the billing department will not refund. I tried to give them the logic that I had just purchased a $230 20 gig MP3 player, that I have spent around $50 in the last six months on their site, and it didn't make sense to piss me off over $5 of worthless music. They could care less. I plan on disputing the transactions on my credit card (including the cost of Plus since they aren't offering the promised technical support) since this may be my only recourse. Troy, take a look at their online help. Type in a key word (such as "rights") to search their knowledge base, and note that you get nothing close to anything to do with "rights", and every article synopsis is identical (and wrong). No company like this should ever be a PC Magazine Editors Choice.

  

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zdphotog June 14, 2005 Member rating:

I have contacted them by email Never get any responses Called on the telephone All I got was answering machines Support is non existant. I do not see where they get such a high rating from magazines since there is no support for this product!!

  

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xaris777 May 9, 2005 Member rating:

I challenge anyone to get anything but an autoresponder from customer support. Each time you reinstall Windows on a machine Musicmatch thinks it is a different machine. You can only play purchased music on 5 Machines. Reinstall your operating system the 6th time and you lose the right to listen to your music. the web sight says to go to one of the old machines and deactivate it in order to free up an activation. Of course the old machines don't exist to deactivate. In that case the FAQ sight says to contact customer support. Yea Right. I have tried repeatedly and am still waithing

  

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rollintraver February 20, 2005 Member rating:

I upgraded from MMJB9 to the new version 10, and the auto song detect option no longer works at all, and the on-line technical support is not helpful. Recording from non-cd sources is one of the main reasons for me to use MMJB, in fact I typically import the results into iTunes because it is a more intuitive interface.