I've been using MusicMatch for several years now. It's always been superior at MP3 file management with super tagging and its presentation of my library of 100GB worth of music. (I did stop using it for ripping CDs last year for Exact Audio Copy for superior control over the ripping process.) However, as I ripped more of my library, MusicMatch performance became an issue. There were times it would crash before even opening or it wouldn't exit cleanly, causing me to reboot. I hate rebooting. MusicMatch support was horrible. That will teach me to buy a lifetime of software upgrades and have any expectations of support.
So Yahoo now owns MusicMatch and created the most abysmal software update since Windows ME. Instead of adding new features, they have removed the ability to edit all but a few tags. In addition, I spent about 3 months of weeknights organizing my tags for consistency and making sure every single song had album art. I deleted my old low-quality MP3s and ripped new ones. Now Yahoo Jukebox doesn't display half or more of my cover art.
The upgrade required I use this "migration wizard". It improperly copied tags and changed my capitalization of artists with all caps. For example, it couldn't migrate "AC/DC", which came over as "Ac". In addition, I now have about 500 songs listed in my library with the track number in the artist field. Some migration.
So I opened up my hand dandy Tag&Rename tool. If you don't have this for your MP3s, it's a great tool for managing MP3 tags. So the tags haven't changed. The only thing I can figure right now is that Yahoo Jukebox creates its own database from the tags. iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player all see the songs properly. I give Yahoo a big fat "WTF?".
It's not all bad. Yahoo Jukebox loads much faster that MusicMatch did. It still uses the same organizational layout of MusicMatch, which I like the best. I have to use plugins for Winamp to get even close to that. iTunes seems buggy and crashes a lot on me. As for Windows Media Player, I hate the way it handles album art for folder images.
Also very annoying: during the installation, the Yahoo Jukebox installer kept crashing, repeatedly. The crashes happened when it tried to install something having to do with Windows Media Player. I'm assuming it was the licensed music crap. Anyway, I uninstalled my K-Lite Codec Pack just to see if that was wrong. It wasn't. Then I re-installed Windows Media Player 11 and that fixed it.
I tried to report the crashing to Yahoo. On the migration page, they have a link to contact support if there is a problem. That link, BTW, is broken and takes you the Yahoo general help page. I've had issues before with Yahoo's supposed customer service. Yahoo has tons of little products and services that receive very little in terms of support. I could go on for a while about Intellisync for YahooMail, which is practically useless because of buggy sync issues.
Like me, if you are a MusicMatch subscriber and want streaming music to bang your head to while trying to beat deadlines, the upgrade is worth it for the fast streaming and music selection. It's much better than MusicMatch's previous offering. But I'm so irritated with Yahoo Jukebox, I will continue to rely on Winamp. I don't need the aggravation.
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