MusicMatch Jukebox Review

Overall Rating

Free
Puts stuff on my MP3 player

Self promoting to the last, and half baked to the core

When I got my MP3 player for Christmas (the player is really good so don't let the software turn you off), it came with MusicMatch Jukebox to put stuff on it. How bad can it be? After all, how hard can it be to make a music playing software? Apparently these people thought it was pretty hard, or they just rushed it out the door. Not only that, but just about every button you press brings up an ad to upgrade the program.

First I'll talk about how it's half baked. On iTunes, everything is listed alphabetically by Artist first, then Album, then numerically by track number. Pretty easy to use. MMJ has lists that you have to open by artist. Then when you want to play a track you have to drag it to a bar on top to play it. Then put tracks behind it if you want them to play afterwards. It doesn't just automatically advance the next track after that if there's nothing left on the bar. Huh?

Then there's no option to just play random tracks, which was one of my favorites from iTunes. But no, there's no shuffle option.

The rip and copy options are very slow (I'll explain why later.)

Another half-baked thing is that the program can't seem to recognize certain CD's, even though I know they are popular. So it brings up the "Search for Track Info" which is really a waste of time. The search engine is very flawed to say the least. When I put in "Guns n' Roses Greatest Hits", not only did the program not recognize it, but when I put all the info in, the first thing that popped up was a Korean Traditional CD that was in no way related in title or content to Guns n' Roses.

So then when you see that the program won't recognize it and you have to put it in yourself, you are presented with the thing that irks me the second most about this program. I know this may sound weird but here it goes... When you go to pick what genre it is, you are given precious few choices. The only one with rock in it is "rock/pop" which drives me nuts because they are NOT the same. But when you've put all that in and say find a mistake and go to EDIT track info after you put it in, the genre bar has about 60 more choices, including about 15 more types of rock. Why wasn't that in the FIRST part? That's just pure laziness.

Finally, for the last of the half-baked options is the fact that stuff that you delete doesn't seem to stay deleted. I had a couple of podcasts that were automatically transferred over to the program as music. But no matter how I try to do it, they won't go away. Sure, they stay deleted while the program is open, but when I open it back up sometimes, not always but sometimes, the stuff I deleted comes back from the dead! Talk about annoying.

Now, here is the part that irks me THE most. The program self advertises its not-free-but-upgraded-part to the DEATH. Almost every action button (burn/copy/OPEN THE PROGRAM) brings up an ad encouraging you upgrade for only $15 a month. And that's not the worst of it. Not upgrading HINDERS the programs performance and limits what you can do! You only get an hour total of the standard radio option without upgrading. CD's burn and copy significantly slower without it, and you are endlessly assaulted by a wave of ads. Ads which probably had more time put into them than the actual program.

The upsides to MMJ is that its free for starters (at least if you have one of the MP3 players it is.) It has standard quality, and it isn't buggy.

Other than the positives listed above there is very little that's good about this program. There are better free programs out there that work just as well, if not better than the MMJ part that you have to pay for *cough iTunes cough*.