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Yahoo Downgrades MusicMatch Jukebox
BanjoBob writes "MusicMatch Jukebox has been a bundle of great MP3 and music management applications in one package. Apparently, it is the end of life for this wonderful MP3 player, ripper, catalog, CD player, Internet radio player, purchase outlet, Auto DJ, Super Tagger, and music database. There was nothing not to like about the product. There is nothing to like about the new downgrade, Yahoo! Music Jukebox. MusicMatch users have been getting notices to 'upgrade'; those who have taken the bait are not pleased. The Yahoo! Music Jukebox feedback forum doesn't have much nice to say about the product. Lots of features have gone away and the 'free upgrade' costs about $20."
I've had problems with MusicMatch bloat for about 2 years now... EVERY TIME I would launch it, it would take so long to go out and "update" streams, etc.. So I finally gave up. I HAD bought the LIFETIME upgrade YEARS ago on it.. so if someone wants to buy my key...
On the other side, WINAMP is awsome... Supports MORE formats than MusicMatch, and has shoutcast, etc.. Again, software worth supporting.
Plus cool skins in Winamp... DUMP Musicmatch and pick up Winamp, you'll be happy when you need to access you music on the windows platform with it.
-Steve
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
What's wrong with joint stereo?!? I know that using a crappy encoder it can make things worse, but that's no reason to blame the feature. In fact using a good encoder like LAME or Fraunhoffer it makes things significantly better because it only goes to joint stereo when the channels are truly the same leaving more bits in the bucket to encode the detail in the music.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I stopped upgrading Musicmatch years ago by permanently blocking it from accessing the internet, back when I discovered the 'old' version ripped iTunes CD's and the 'new' didn't; it was a free no-choice-in-the-matter 'upgrade.' At that moment I learned my lesson and got off the upgrade train for all my applications unless and until I understood what was changing and why ahead of time.
Ibid.
"nothing not to like" ?!?!?! BULS&*@!
musicmatch was a big hairy craptacular piece of garbage.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
I don't get it. How can a "free" upgrade cost money? Is there some loophole in trade law that allows this?
May the Maths Be with you!
Really? I have 4,244 files consuming 41 gig of space and I find it to be neither slow nor memory intensive. Right now for me (and it's been running and constantly playing a few days now) it's using 41.8mb total (which includes the shared memory with KDE libraries so its actual footprint is smaller, though I can't tell you exactly how much smaller). It launches in about 2 seconds and all of its features respond instantly.
Compare that with iTunes on the same hardware (I have identical machines side-by-side one running Windows, and the other Ubuntu Feisty, using Synergy to control them). This takes around 10 seconds to launch and with exactly zero songs in its library consumes 38.6 meg.
So in comparing like for like, my 4,000+ song 41gig Amarok is faster with a similar memory footprint to the substantially less featureful iTunes with an empty library.
So I'm not really sure what your basis for comparison is. Maybe you're running AmaroK under Gnome and noticing startup sluggishness due to the KDE libraries needing to be initialized? (which you don't experience if you run AmaroK under KDE since these are initialized when you log in, and also the reported memory stays the same, but actual memory footprint is much lower since in that desktop so many of the libraries which count against AmaroK's reported memory are also shared with a variety of other apps)
The only thing I can think is that perhaps you're comparing it to XMMS or Winamp 3.x series (each eating under 10 meg of RAM and starting virtually instantly). Certainly if you want a music player that does nothing but play music you won't be satisfied with the performance loss to music juke boxes like AmaroK and iTunes. But in that case, may I suggest mpg123 as your primary music player since this will be even smaller and faster yet!
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Agreed. Musicmatch has always been one of those applications that is annoyingly bundled with sound cards and OEM installed widgets...I have used it, but never for very long.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
From the parent post of changed features I would suspect they either re-wrote the app, or replaced it and attempted to make it somewhat similar. Probably because they don't have the original crew to maintain the original code anymore. Happens too often.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I have used MusicMatch since it's inception, and loved it. My friends all sword by WINAMP and others, but there was something about MusicMatch that was more appealing.
You COULD RIP CD's, download network stream music and save it to your Music Library so it will always be there, Play Radio of your Favorite Music Genre, and loads of other things.
Now, after "upgrading" here's what I get. Constant stream interruption from Yahoo, as they must check my "license". LESS music from the UNLIMITED listen area. Before you could find just about ANYONE, now, IF you find your favorite 60's band (shut up, it's already established that I'm old), you are lucky if there are more then 8 tracks for you to choose. Just this past evening (I'm suffering thru some insomnia) I was listening to the "Classic Rock" channel and no less then 4 times did the Stream stop because Yahoo was trying to check for a license. Apparently they were having trouble checking, because I was told the music stopped because they couldn't find a license for it. The instructions on the screen said I should DOWNGRADE my MusicMatch to 8.1 and use it instead.
I really was hopeful that since Yahoo took things over, they might actually improve the service; although it didn't need MUCH improvement. As it stands right now though, when September 1 comes (my due date for renewal) if things haven't changed, I'll be looking for a new music streaming source, suggestions friends?
Too many fingers in the pie, and people are polite instead of telling the truth and offending those who need to grow up and deal with the fact that they're not always right.
Marketing wants to make sure we channel users toward buying the upgrade, legal is concerned about having too powerful of an mp3 ripper, management wants to simplify it so our support costs are less... the product that was once a great idea ends up being a stripped-down, pointless version of itself.
The problem that causes this isn't unique to corporations. It's unique to large groups of humans where we are afraid to tell the truth for social consequences. I've seen it in volunteer groups, the F/OSS movement, even friend groups trying to pick a restaurant.
It is the Human Disease, and the only solution is to get over our personal pretenses and look at the task, not how we represent ourselves in it.
technical writing / development
So iTunes can sort your collection by the maiden name of the mother of the 3rd girlfriend of the drummer of the band?
Great!
... except sticking some human-unreadable crap in the comment tag is a big no-no, not just from aestethic point of view, but also from the most basic standpoint of sane software design. That is so because inserting hexadecimal goo into comments fields, and thus essentially destroying their contents and usefulness for human readers, is not an acceptable method of storing data, but a desperate kludge by someone who had no idea where to put the extraneous pile of bits. If an application must store the names of pet cats of the songs writer's landlords, it should do so either in a dedicated MP3 ID tag, or, better yet (since sanity will soon leave us when 152454th tag type is introduced to store the "favourite flower of the accountant of the producer of the album"), in a separate database linked to your files via MD5 checksums or what not as this does not damage/corrupt the MP3 files themselves from the point of use in other software/players or human readability.
I actually met one of the MusicMatch engineers and I tell you, I've never felt so bad for a guy. They were so proud of their product when it was MusicMatch. Then Yahoo bought them out and overnight they were working at breakneck speed converting it to Yahoo's vision of the Yahoo Music Engine (as it was called then) to launch their Yahoo Music Unlimited service on. I guess somewhere in the rush a bad memory leak was introduced (along with a few smaller problems). I don't think they ever got around to fixing the leak because it was too deep rooted in the code. Instead, they jury rigged it to where it wouldn't kill Windows, just make the software itself slow as all get out. Basically, everytime they went to actually fix the software, Yahoo kept pushing more of their external changes. Now it's to the point where I'll be surprised if they ever fix it unless they just scrap what they have and start over.
I would like to say, however, as much as the software sucks the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service for $7 a month is the best $7 I spend each month. Less than the price of a cd and I'm actually surprised at some of the obscure stuff I find on it. If your tastes are more mainstream, you'll find everything you want minus Zepplin and a few other hard to contract acts.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
IMHO Windows Media Player 11 is much better than iTunes at this point. It's responsive, good looking, downloads cover art from the web, rips and burns audio CDs with ease, and keeps good tabs on the additions/removals from my media library. I'll never be accused of being a Microsoft fan but this is one of their upgrades that went well. Really the only music organizer that I like as much is Amarok which isn't an option for my Vista machine.
HADUKEN WALL OF TEXT ATTACK!
I recently experienced the Musicmatch downgrade. As a result, I went out and collected Windows-based MP3 players. Here are my conclusions:
1. Musicmatch v10. - didn't work well with large MP3 libraries. The librarian program (MIM.EXE) had a nasty habit of hanging the whole system. Has my personal favorite music browsing interface, a tree with Artist/Album/Songs
2. iTunes v7.2 - only interface to the iTunes store, which is the best MP3 storefront I have found. Has a nasty habit of using 100% of system resources whenever it wants to. I dislike the browser interface. DRM'd to the max. I only use this to manage my iPod and buy music. (Ed: store does use DRM, but has option to buy non-drm tracks, and the store's DRM is "less bad" than every other DRM out there, e.g. allowing tracks to be burned as CD-audio and re-ripped to a drm-free format. Still too onerous for me to buy any, but far better than WMP DRM)
3. WinAmp v5.35 - heavily customizable, but I could never figure out how to implement my favored music browsing interface. Too damn many Windows.
4. MediaMonkey v2.5.5 - my new favorite player. Gives me the Music Explorer Tree. Fast. Let's me play music and playlists from my iPod, which even iTunes won't let me do. Reasonable ripping.
5. Windows Media Player v11 - Slick looking user interface. Lousy music browser. Also DRM'd to the max. A Microsoft product - need I say more?
6. Yahoo MusicMatch - Don't know the version because it pissed me off so much I deleted it from my computer. This player has the music player trifecta - DRM'd, slow, lousy interface. Oh yes, and it deluges you with annoying adds. Avoid this player like the plague. Bottomline - if they had just FIXED MusicMatch v10, I think it would have been the best of the lot. Instead, Yahoo replaced it with some crap they scraped off the sidewalk.
I'm trapped with iTunes to manage my iPod, although I suspect that if I screw around with MediaMonkey it will do that, too. Use WinAmp if you like blinking lights and pretty pictures. Otherwise, MediaMonkey is the best of the lot.
what's wrong with a file system? it is pretty much the easiest way to access my music and video.
/Artist/Album/nn-SongName.mp3 like most people do.
Using the filesystem as a music browser sucks because (with some exceptions -- BeOS being the only one I'm aware of), the filesystem isn't aware of most of the metadata stored inside the media files themselves. It's fine if you only listen to music by browsing the Artist/Album tree, but if you want to do something more complex -- listen randomly to all songs from a particular genre, or perform some sort of Boolean-AND search -- you're a bit hosed if you've just got your music tucked away in
Support for arbitrary, user-defined metadata on the filesystem level -- or even better, RDBMS-like features -- is pretty cool, but in the past 10 years or so there have been a bunch of attempts to bring it into wide use and none of them have really succeeded very well. And at least for most people, purpose-built metadata browsers (music jukebox programs, which scan metadata and dump it into an index file for speedy browsing sorting, and searching), work pretty well. I don't see that changing too soon.
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