Digital Home Thoughts: Tricks for Using MediaMonkey from C|NET

I've been meaning to post about MediaMonkey for ages, but when I saw this video on C|NET it finally jogged my memory. MediaMonkey is an amazingly powerful tool for ripping CDs, playing back music, and most importantly of all, tagging your music. I've used different programs to rip my CDs over the years, and last year when I got serious about cleaning up the ID3 tags, I realized what a wreck some of them were. It seems one program I used defaulted to making all albums released in the year 2000, and another program only supported album names that were under 20 characters long - so I had a lot of incorrect meta data in my songs. It took me a while to get used to MediaMonkey - it's a very powerful program, and while I wouldn't say it's hard to use, it has some serious depth and thus takes some time to fully explore. I use it now to adjust meta data post-rip (I often assign slightly customized genres) and embed album art into the file itself, which is incredibly cool and another topic I need to delve into. There's also a rich community of third-party plugins and tools for MediaMonkey that extends its usefulness. Best of all? The basic version of MediaMonkey is free - I opted to buy a lifetime license because the program saved me so much time. If you want to get your music library under control, I urge you to give MediaMonkey a try.