What is Reddit's opinion of MusicBee?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Does everything you need

Does even more

Does nothing, but its free

You might want to consider switching to MusicBee to manage your library. It has a wide range of in-built functionality as well as the ability to add external plug-ins to gain new features, and an absolutely fantastic user community for support.

I've never utilised the ratings system of any music service beyond a binary "it's either 5-stars or it's none" kind of way so MusicBee's "Love" attribute is great for me, but it does have a star-rating system (including half-stars).

I just did some testing and I was able to export to a new playlist all library items where Artist and Title were duplicated, which then allows me to Ctrl+A and apply a star-rating to each file - screenshot. I went into this not knowing exactly how I was going to do it, but it was literally a case of clicking through one or two menus to get it to do what I wanted.

It also has a decently powerful Autotagging function which can tag according to an album, individual file attribute data or using the file's digital sound signature - though full disclosure I've not personally had much success with that method.

I also understand that scripting is an integral feature of the application.

I'm not 100% certain that this is exactly what you're looking for but it may be worth looking into. Best of luck.

First of all, merging track pages on Last.fm is not possible yet. The duplicates happen because of different spellings. It's enough to write apostrophe ’ instead of ' in your tags and you have two different tracks. It's a known problem and they are working on it.

Now to Musicbee: Of course you have to have your tracks saved on your local storage (mp3 or flac for example) and your Last.fm account connected in the settings. I recommend the plugin Last.fm Playlist Generator, this is pretty easy to use and you can create different sorts of playlists from your Last.fm library.

You can also create auto-playlists without any plugin, you just have to sync your Last.fm playcount with your local MusicBee library (options, plugins, last.fm settings) and use the playcount as a playlist rule.

I don't know your exact specs and requirements, but it could be worthwhile to check out MusicBee.
When I was looking for a media player/library manager a couple years back that one was recommended due to its ability to handle really large libraries. Also it has good tools to organize stuff and scan (deep) folders.

Although I haven't used it as extensively as you mention.

It is Windows only though, but accessing your music through a network drive is no problem.

MusicBee is my player of choice and it does this. Even allows you to have custom start times, per your last point. Then I sometimes use TagScanner to strip metadata I don't want which may be of use to you as well.

I would definitely install some of the lyric plug-ins from the website, this is probably the main one. I think I have all of them installed, since there isn't really a downside to doing so. And you can organize the search order in Preferences->Tags (2).

Also, tags can matter. I think it searches by (album) artist and Title, maybe by album too. But if there are any alternate names or if the name is originally in a different language, you might need to change it to that.

If you listen to obscure/not popular music though, there just might not be any lyrics for it on any of the searched services.

You mean playing songs that are downloaded through Spotify premium? I think those can be played only by Spotify due to DRM.

However you might be able to stream from Spotify by using different player. Groove is incredibly basic so I would be surprised if it could integrate with Spotify. Foobar and MusicBee seem to have Spotify plugins.

Also Spotify uses vorbis instead of mp3 so you wouldn't want to output in mp3 since transcoding from lossy codec to another lossy codec degrades quality (if it's audibke for you, that's a different question). You want to keep source format (vorbis/ogg).

a) There are no 'people' who make MusicBee. It is developed and supported by one person, in his spare time, and asks for nothing in return.

b) The 'computer node' function hasn't changed in quite so time.

c) I suggest you spend some time looking at the 'official' MB forum, where a search should get you the answers you're looking for. And if not, many forum users there will be happy to help. www.getmusicbee.com/forum

d) You might also want to spend some time looking at the Wiki, starting with the anatomy of MB here: https://musicbee.fandom.com/wiki/The_Anatomy_of_MusicBee

MP3 ID3 metadata does include a "play counter" field. However, File Explorer doesn't have the option to display it via a column.

Some music programs do have the option to display it though, such as Musicbee (which I use/love).

Musicbee also has a "History" view, which will show you exactly when you last played which songs (optionally visible via a column). This data however is not a part of the ID3 standard, and is rather only stored in the database Musicbee maintains for your library.

Other music formats use different methods for storing metadata. FLAC files for instance use Vorbis comments.

Winamp is a fine player but is a poor choice if you want to edit the music tags (artist, album, genre, year, ...). Unless you have a small library or don't bother with the tags, you're smart to use something else for editing.

For anyone interested MediaMonkey (Windows only) is nice for editing tags though it does have its problems. MusicBee (also Windows only) seems pretty good too but I much prefer the SQL database MediaMonkey uses internally instead of the proprietary one in MusicBee. (If anyone's still interested, I can explain why :) ).

Hey, I faced the same issue in iTunes when I was trying to organize my collection in it a few months ago. Seems like its a bug and I couldn't find any fixes for it.
I suggest you try out Musicbee , It's not as simple to set up as iTunes and it may take you a few minutes in the settings to customize it to your liking, but believe me, it's totally worth it.
It's lighter on the system resources than iTunes and offers way more functions.

Sadly there's not. There's a plugin you can use to listen to a specific portion only, but it's very limited: https://www.getmusicbee.com/addons/plugins/20/track-previewer/

I use Audacity for A/B'ing.

I’ve found MusicBee (https://www.getmusicbee.com/) does a great job of rip/tag/FLAC for me, but I’ll certainly be taking a look at EAC to see which works better for me.

Certainly good for thought on the process of populating the library, thanks for sharing OP

If it is about playing downloads, I prefer a PC, preferably with a large screen, a versatile media player e.g. MusicBee (https://www.getmusicbee.com/) allowing for bit prefect playback and a outboard USB DAC.

PS, have a look at FLAC as mp3 is lossy compression by design.

I'm a MusicBee user as well, and I don't think it has to the compatibility to sync libraries and play count across multiple devices. You might be able to simulate the capability, as far as play count is concerned, with its UPnP/DLNA server plug-in - I'll post a link to it below. However, that plug-in was a bit buggy the last time I used it, and it's no longer actively supported by its developer.

https://www.getmusicbee.com/addons/plugins/11/upnp-dlna-device-support/

I have an M6 and I recommend MusicBee on my PC to organize things and make playlists.

It also depends on what software player you're using on the M6 itself. The native Fiio player requires you to go through some hoops to import .M3U playlists. But you can install other players from the Fiio website. You can technically install any APK software from places like APKPure.com, but the M6 is pretty underpowered, so you're better off getting the versions that are specifically tuned for the M6 from the Fiio web site.

My favourite player, Musicolet, allows you to import the M3U playlists one by one. It's a big of an annoyance, but you only have to do it once per list. My second favourite player, Media Monkey, imports them automatically.

Make sure to download your Google Play Music library while you still can. Avoid transferring to YouTube Music, instead download the actual music to a computer. Or at least download it first, then try to transfer to YouTube Music to see if you can do both.

Then, maintain your own music library with something like MusicBee. This is a pretty great desktop app for managing your library. More importantly, it lets you specify device settings so that you can plug your phone in and sync or even sync wirelessly automatically as you update your library. There are others, foobar2000 helps with batch tagging. But most purchased music is properly tagged already so MusicBee alone will probably do the trick.

All that's left is to choose a music player for Android (it doesn't have to be MusicBee), and point it to wherever the music folder is on your phone (that you set up with MusicBee syncing).

The final step would be to properly back up your music, either with periodic physical/offsite backup, storing it on a cloud service like Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.

It's definitely more involved than just purchasing and listening from a centralized source, but at least you won't get burned by a service shutting down anymore.

You may find yourself going down the rabbit hole to robust setups described on r/selfhosted, but that's a lot more involved.

I recommend MusicBee. Very user-friendly free music player.

https://www.getmusicbee.com/

It has playlist capability.

And if you move songs on your hard drive from with the end MusicBee, it will update any playlists it manages accordingly.

Are they streaming in AAC? My Musicbee lost the AAC codec recently resulting in those stations not working, I had to copy the codec bass_aac.dll back in.

See AAC secton here: https://www.getmusicbee.com/help/faq/

Everything is downloaded, tagged, saved to an SD card and played on my PC through Music Bee. Also saved to my phone's SD card and played through Poweramp.

Can't recommend Music Bee enough. https://www.getmusicbee.com/

I can cast either through Steamlink, or Android's native casting function.

I would recommend to use Last.fm, because you can easily backup your scrobbles from the website, and you get this file: %appdata%\MusicBee\LastFmScrobble.log

There is also another method:

1. Install Additional Tagging & Reporting Tools
2. Go to your history in MusicBee
3. Mark the entire history (Ctrl+A)
4. Right click on the marked entries -> Additional Tagging & Reporting Tools -> Copy tags to clipboard
5. Choose the tags you want to have in your history file. For example Title, Artist, Album and Last played time.
6. Paste it into a text file and save it.

Folder structure : D:/music/Album Artist/Album/## - Album Artist - Song Title.extension

For general listening, Winamp; for tagging and library management, MusicBee (www.getmusicbee.com).

I use my desktop for searching for tracks and downloading. Any WAV files I get I convert to FLAC. Copy all new tracks to a folder on an external drive, then copy them to a temporary folder on my DJ laptop. I'll make a new playlist in MusicBee, dump the new files into there and start fixing tags. Once tags are done, MusicBee can auto-organize your files into any specified folder structure you set (see above for mine) based off of the ID3 tags. After auto-organize, drag and drop into a new Serato playlist labeled the date of import. Analyze the files in Serato and done.

I search the bowels of Soundcloud and Bandcamp for tracks. Tags/recommended rabbit holes..

For Spotify I found this useful: http://sortyourmusic.playlistmachinery.com/
For the local music files I'm very happy with MusicBee, which has the option to create fine-tuned automatic playlists, using all sorts of metadata.

The skin is Arsenic Atratum. The theater mode uses a slightly modified Minimal Glass. I prefer having a minimalist interface, so I removed quite a few UI elements, which you can do in MusicBee settings.

It should be the default font. however there is an option called segoe greyed out. however im using the spotify musicbee skin https://www.getmusicbee.com/addons/skins/91/spotify-039-s-accent-dark/ to make it look that way.

It's supposed to just do it automatically based on the available width; I didn't configure it to be that way specifically. You can try turning off/shrinking your side panels and see if it gets any better, or update to the newest version of MusicBee 3.1 if you're not on it already. Steven had made a change around that time to make it a little more generous with minimum available width before switching to multiple columns. :)

Whatever music you like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As for playing it, I don't use the in-game radio too often. I usually just have MusicBee running in the background, and I use the MusicBee Remote plugin + app on my phone for full control of playlists, volume, etc.

Gonna recommend MusicBee to anyone with music on their PC, it allows you to analyse tracks and have them play back at the same volume without modifying the original file.

I used MusicBee when I embed lyrics to my music archive (approximately 200 songs). Listening a song once or twice is usually enough to add lyrics and sync them. It took about 1 month in total.