by oneoffbeat » Sun Apr 14, 2019 6:16 am
I consider myself still intermediate after odd 10+ years of MM use, since I'm not able to do much under the hood fixes or create custom scripts or perhaps be able to take advantage of all of its finest, advanced features, but I believe I'm pretty clever in utilizing MM's existing features to suit my personal needs, editing what MM has available for music organizing and management. Personally I don't use MM for general media management, only music to which I think it's the best ever database and organizer software - could be one of the best if not the best organizer and database for any purpose for a personal computer user.
I do hope there were two separate MediaMonkeys, or at least the video and music sections were under their own separate user interfaces without general overlapping. A general common user interface for playback in Kodi style would be ok though, but managing and organizing should be separated, such different are video and music for medias in their essence. Though the video or TV and other for me less interesting features can be ignored, they still tend to confuse sometimes and sort of get in the way a bit. At least for me, a music enthusiast, music has infinite re-use potential, but how many times can you really watch the same tv-shows or movies, or even music videos? I watch the same movie or TV-show episode usually just once or twice, never more than a few times at tops, hence they hardly need organizing and managing for the future keep and use like music does. I must have watched less than a dozen movies in my life for over five times each and perhaps the best chosen few each for 10 times at max. Some of my most favorite TV-shows have lasted perhaps mere 5+ re-watches per the best episodes. TV and movies get old way fast and there are very few that last the test of time indeed, unlike genuine artistically high quality music. People are different though, I believe, so each their own, but this is my take on the matter of media consumption. Another thing about the TV and video content is, that it consumes quite a lot of disc space, so keeping them in library has it's toll, especially if you only watch them for few times, hence I perform infrequent purges on them to gain back the disc space for new videos, something I hardly ever do for music, even if there are songs or albums that I rarely listen to, but even them are good to keep handy since they don't waste that much disc space after all.
Unlike watching moving images, I must have listened to thousands of my favorite tunes for hundreds of times each and still they feel fresh after a while again, if I happen to listen some of them too often in a shorter span of time. Maybe it has something to do with the thing that music deals with different section of the human perception, than audiovisual media does, music a bit like written words in books, leaves room for imagination and you can visualize the music yourself in different ways depending where and when you're listening it to. If you watch and listen something on screen, your senses are being fully catered and you just absorb it from there, hardly room for imagining things yourself. Or while on the go you can't watch things on screen, by foot or riding/driving a vehicle (at least not safely, with two of your main senses focused on something other than your actual whereabouts and where you're going), like you can with music (better use semi open headphones though, or speakers in a car and not blast the volume too loud to remain aware of the sounds from reality surrounding you). After managing the library in MM and crafting a good autoplaylist to go, playing that back on shuffle and repeat all, I can listen to the same playlist tens and tens of times before it starts to get old. That's what I need and use MediaMonkey for, to manage and organizing my favorite music by rating and tagging it in order to be able to generate perfect autoplaylists that keep the music fresh for re-use over and over again and for the plus I'm not tied to my sofa to listen to it.
Once long time ago I had this moment of enlightenment listening to a compilation CD in portable player, that if I select only the favorite songs from the tracks and only play them on shuffle and repeat, the CD would feel fresh much longer than just listening to all of the tracks in order they were printed on the disc. Then came the portable MP3 CD-players that could playback CD-R discs easily holding music worth 9 to 11 CDs and that's when managing the music became crucial, because it was no point listening to just isolated albums anymore, but it was time to release the potential of the most favorite songs playing them back on a common playlist. I must have few thousand favorite songs today that I keep swapping to my phone's player in couple of hundred of songs chunks at the time and couldn't live without MediaMonkey doing that, or at least music management without MM would lack an interface that offers all you need to keep your music managed and organized for repeated use on various playback devices, domestic or portable.
Anyway, for general media management and playback I prefer to use Kodi running on LibreElec OS in Raspi 3+, which is much more convenient setup for general purpose media browsing and playback when connected to tv and audio amplifier with speakers. I use MM's UPnP server to share my carefully crafted autoplaylists from my desktop computer to playback in Kodi and it works pretty good too, which I'm very much grateful for.
Long story, thank you if you had interest and patience to read it all.
EDIT: a typo
I consider myself still intermediate after odd 10+ years of MM use, since I'm not able to do much under the hood fixes or create custom scripts or perhaps be able to take advantage of all of its finest, advanced features, but I believe I'm pretty clever in utilizing MM's existing features to suit my personal needs, editing what MM has available for music organizing and management. Personally I don't use MM for general media management, only music to which I think it's the best ever database and organizer software - could be one of the best if not the best organizer and database for any purpose for a personal computer user.
I do hope there were two separate MediaMonkeys, or at least the video and music sections were under their own separate user interfaces without general overlapping. A general common user interface for playback in Kodi style would be ok though, but managing and organizing should be separated, such different are video and music for medias in their essence. Though the video or TV and other for me less interesting features can be ignored, they still tend to confuse sometimes and sort of get in the way a bit. At least for me, a music enthusiast, music has infinite re-use potential, but how many times can you really watch the same tv-shows or movies, or even music videos? I watch the same movie or TV-show episode usually just once or twice, never more than a few times at tops, hence they hardly need organizing and managing for the future keep and use like music does. I must have watched less than a dozen movies in my life for over five times each and perhaps the best chosen few each for 10 times at max. Some of my most favorite TV-shows have lasted perhaps mere 5+ re-watches per the best episodes. TV and movies get old way fast and there are very few that last the test of time indeed, unlike genuine artistically high quality music. People are different though, I believe, so each their own, but this is my take on the matter of media consumption. Another thing about the TV and video content is, that it consumes quite a lot of disc space, so keeping them in library has it's toll, especially if you only watch them for few times, hence I perform infrequent purges on them to gain back the disc space for new videos, something I hardly ever do for music, even if there are songs or albums that I rarely listen to, but even them are good to keep handy since they don't waste that much disc space after all.
Unlike watching moving images, I must have listened to thousands of my favorite tunes for hundreds of times each and still they feel fresh after a while again, if I happen to listen some of them too often in a shorter span of time. Maybe it has something to do with the thing that music deals with different section of the human perception, than audiovisual media does, music a bit like written words in books, leaves room for imagination and you can visualize the music yourself in different ways depending where and when you're listening it to. If you watch and listen something on screen, your senses are being fully catered and you just absorb it from there, hardly room for imagining things yourself. Or while on the go you can't watch things on screen, by foot or riding/driving a vehicle (at least not safely, with two of your main senses focused on something other than your actual whereabouts and where you're going), like you can with music (better use semi open headphones though, or speakers in a car and not blast the volume too loud to remain aware of the sounds from reality surrounding you). After managing the library in MM and crafting a good autoplaylist to go, playing that back on shuffle and repeat all, I can listen to the same playlist tens and tens of times before it starts to get old. That's what I need and use MediaMonkey for, to manage and organizing my favorite music by rating and tagging it in order to be able to generate perfect autoplaylists that keep the music fresh for re-use over and over again and for the plus I'm not tied to my sofa to listen to it.
Once long time ago I had this moment of enlightenment listening to a compilation CD in portable player, that if I select only the favorite songs from the tracks and only play them on shuffle and repeat, the CD would feel fresh much longer than just listening to all of the tracks in order they were printed on the disc. Then came the portable MP3 CD-players that could playback CD-R discs easily holding music worth 9 to 11 CDs and that's when managing the music became crucial, because it was no point listening to just isolated albums anymore, but it was time to release the potential of the most favorite songs playing them back on a common playlist. I must have few thousand favorite songs today that I keep swapping to my phone's player in couple of hundred of songs chunks at the time and couldn't live without MediaMonkey doing that, or at least music management without MM would lack an interface that offers all you need to keep your music managed and organized for repeated use on various playback devices, domestic or portable.
Anyway, for general media management and playback I prefer to use Kodi running on LibreElec OS in Raspi 3+, which is much more convenient setup for general purpose media browsing and playback when connected to tv and audio amplifier with speakers. I use MM's UPnP server to share my carefully crafted autoplaylists from my desktop computer to playback in Kodi and it works pretty good too, which I'm very much grateful for.
Long story, thank you if you had interest and patience to read it all. :D
EDIT: a typo