MediaMonkey is a

digital Digital usually refers to something using discrete digits, often binary digits. Technology and computing Hardware *Digital electronics, electronic circuits which operate using digital signals **Digital camera, which captures and stores digital i ...

media player and media library application developed by Ventis Media Inc., for organizing and playing audio on

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and Android

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s. MediaMonkey for Windows (sometimes noted as MMW) includes various management tools, and is extensible using plugins, while MediaMonkey for Android (often referred to as MMA) is an adjunct for sharing the library with Android devices. MediaMonkey is commonly displayed/marketed as a solution for managing large libraries of music. MediaMonkey uses the

freemium Freemium, a portmanteau of the words "free" and "premium," is a pricing strategy by which a basic product or service is provided free of charge, but money (a premium) is charged for additional features, services, or virtual (online) or physical (o ...

licensing model. The base program is available as

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

but a premium "Gold" license unlocks additional features such as the ability to have multiple media collections, organize files automatically, and others. Both editions can be extensively enhanced with skins, third-party plugins, and user-generated extension scripts. It uses

SQLite SQLite (, ) is a database engine written in the C programming language. It is not a standalone app; rather, it is a library that software developers embed in their apps. As such, it belongs to the family of embedded databases. It is the most ...

to manage its database.

Features

Audio CDs

Music can be

ripped Ripped may refer to: * Ripped, a slang term for having achieved muscle hypertrophy * '' Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music'', a book by Greg Kot * ''Ripped,'' a series of books and DVDs by Clarence Bass * "Ripped", an episode of ...

from audio CDs and encoded into most supported formats. Music can be burned to CD/

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kin ...

format in compressed or

CD audio Compact Disc Digital Audio (CDDA or CD-DA), also known as Digital Audio Compact Disc or simply as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the ''Red Book'', one of a series of Rainbow Books (named fo ...

format, optionally normalizing the volume level of the songs in the process.

Supported formats

MediaMonkey supports music playback using

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New York * American Aviation, a company from Cleveland, ...

, WMA,

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software p ...

, MPC,

APE Apes (collectively Hominoidea ) are a clade of Old World simians native to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (though they were more widespread in Africa, most of Asia, and as well as Europe in prehistory), which together with its siste ...

, and

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Win ...

. It can adjust volume levels automatically using

ReplayGain ReplayGain is a proposed technical standard published by David Robinson in 2001 to measure and normalize the perceived loudness of audio in computer audio formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. It allows media players to normalize loudness for indi ...

and

MP3Gain MP3Gain is an audio normalization software tool. The tool is available on multiple platforms and is free software. It analyzes the MP3 and reversibly changes its volume. The volume can be adjusted for single files or as album where all files woul ...

Music library

MediaMonkey's music library attempts to organize and categorize a user's music collection. Upon installation, it will scan the user's hard drives for music files and add them to its library. Ratings and playback information can be imported from other media players such as

Winamp Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Sinc ...

and

Windows Media Player Windows Media Player (WMP) is the first media player and media library application that was developed by Microsoft for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on ...

. Podcasts are supported through the ''Podcatcher'' which allows the user to subscribe to podcasts that MediaMonkey will automatically download. It can also monitor the user's hard drive to ensure that any changes are automatically updated in the library.

Device sync

MediaMonkey can sync music files with most portable audio devices including the

Apple iPod The iPod is a discontinued series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about months after the Macintosh version of iTunes wa ...

, Apple iPhone,

Palm Pre The Palm Pre , styled as palm prē, is a multitasking smartphone that was designed and marketed by Palm with a multi-touch screen and a sliding keyboard. The smartphone was the first to use Palm's Linux-based mobile operating system, webOS. The ...

, and Android-based devices.

Addons

MediaMonkey has support for third-party plugins to extend the base functionality. Available plugins include a

Last.fm Last.fm is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. Using a music recommender system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of the tracks the user listens to, e ...

scrobbler, a plugin to show lyrics, and a web remote-control interface. MediaMonkey also supports the Winamp 2 API, allowing a user to use any of the many input, output,

DSP DSP may refer to: Computing * Digital signal processing, the mathematical manipulation of an information signal * Digital signal processor, a microprocessor designed for digital signal processing * Yamaha DSP-1, a proprietary digital signal ...

, and visualization plugins developed for Winamp.

History

Songs-DB

MediaMonkey was first developed in 2001 under the name Songs-DB. Songs-DB version 1.0.0 was released on October 12, 2001. Development progressed steadily with version 1.1 released June 7, 2002. Songs-DB 1.1 was the first version to provide Winamp plugin support.MediaMonkey Change Log
/ref> Version 1.2 was released on July 3, 2002, and included improved Winamp plugin support, significant UI improvements, and scripting support. Version 1.3 was released on October 31, 2002, and added Ogg Vorbis support and the ability to burn CDs.

MediaMonkey 2

For version 2.0, Songs-DB was renamed to MediaMonkey. MediaMonkey 2.0 was released on August 25, 2003. MediaMonkey 2.2, released on June 9, 2004, added

iTunes iTunes () is a software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mul ...

-like device synchronization. This synchronization functionality was extended to include syncing to actual iPods in version 2.4, released June 5, 2005. The last major release of the 2.x series was MediaMonkey 2.5, released on December 28, 2005. MediaMonkey 2.5 added improved synchronization for all current iPod,

Creative Labs Creative Technology Ltd. is a Singaporean multinational technology company headquartered with overseas offices in Shanghai, Tokyo, Dublin, and Silicon Valley (where in the US it is known as Creative Labs). The principal activities of the compa ...

, and iRiver devices, along with full FLAC support. Minor releases of MediaMonkey continued for the next year, culminating in MediaMonkey 2.5.5 which was released on January 30, 2007.

MediaMonkey 3

MediaMonkey 3.0.1 was released on December 25, 2007. MediaMonkey 3 was designed specifically with large user libraries in mind. This was seen in version 3.0.3, released on June 19, 2008, which increased the supported library size to 100,000+ tracks (from a previously advertised 50,000 tracks).

MediaMonkey 4

MediaMonkey 4.0 was released on December 16, 2011. This version introduced better synchronization with Android devices, library sharing over DLNA / UPnP, improved audio output via WASAPI, the ability to run from a USB stick, and secure CD ripping. MediaMonkey 4.1.0 was released Jan 31, 2014. This version introduced wireless synchronization with MediaMonkey for Android and bi-directional synchronization, a darker look and feel, and UPnP improvements. The current version is MediaMonkey 4.1.29, released in July 2020.

MediaMonkey 5

MediaMonkey 5.0 entered a public beta on December 20, 2016. This version uses the

Chromium Chromium is a chemical element with the symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in group 6. It is a steely-grey, lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal. Chromium metal is valued for its high corrosion resistance and hardne ...

rendering engine Rendering or image synthesis is the process of generating a physically-based rendering, photorealistic or Non-photorealistic rendering, non-photorealistic image from a 2D model, 2D or 3D model by means of a computer program. The resulting im ...

and

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

for its user interface, as opposed to previous versions' natively rendered interface.

MediaMonkey Server

Alpha testing Software testing is the act of examining the artifacts and the behavior of the software under test by validation and verification. Software testing can also provide an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to apprecia ...

for an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

, server-only implementation of MediaMonkey was publicly announced on August 15, 2018. Clients connect to the MediaMonkey server (MMS) from either a web browser or MediaMonkey 5 beta, to access and manage the media library. According to the developer Rusty, "We created it because UPnP doesn't scale sufficiently for our users, and because DB sharing hacks weren't sufficiently robust."

Assessments

MediaMonkey has been widely recognized for many years as a leading tool for organizing and managing large libraries of digital music, praised for its automatic functions and other powerful capabilities. It is criticized for having an outdated user interface, being difficult to learn, and only running on Windows.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Mediamonkey IPod software Windows-only freeware Windows media players Tag editors Windows CD ripping software Windows CD/DVD writing software Streaming software Jukebox-style media players