Why don't I just use iTunes? Well, a bunch of reasons:
- It's kind of a resource hog on a Windows PC.
- There is no way to "enqueue" a file. You have to have a playlist and then you can add a song next in a playlist. I never really save playlists, I'm more of an on the fly type of guy. But I also don't want to just stop the song that is currently playing. The party shuffle is constantly changing, so if you drag to that your files get lost.
- Winamp has a "Add songs that are like this one" feature using CDDB. I have never succesfully gotten it to work, but it seems cool. iTunes is missing this. It has the Playlist generator, but it isn't powerful enough. The playlist generator should factor in things such as # of plays, last played, genre weighting, rating weighting, etc... I swear I am going to write something that does this at some point in my life.
However it comes up short on a few things:
- Some information is saved to the ID3 tag and some is managed by the Media Library plugin. I have a habit of moving my mp3's around on my hard drive (not to mention I have multiple hard drives in the library), and there is no way to get it to link an old database entry to the mp3 in the new location. You would think if the hash was the same it could assume it is the same file but it doesn't do anything of the sort. This means that everytime I move a file I lose my # of plays, rating, gain level, etc..
- It's ugly.
So I found a couple programs which show merit. MediaMonkey (used to use WinAmp as it's playing engine), and Helium Music Manager. Media Monkey is a free basic level, and Helium has a 30-day free trial. We'll see if any of them make me happy....
