In my seemingly never-ending quest to find the best solution for handling my music and my iPod without iTunes, I have been playing with J. River Media Jukebox.
I’ve been looking as much for a replacement for my beloved, much out-of-date, and long defunct MusicMatch Jukebox (R.I.P.). I’ve been using the same old piece of software for almost ten years, and it was time to upgrade. The problem was, there wasn’t anything out there that did everything I needed it to do. I wanted good, flexible metadata handling (including custom fields), playlists, drag-and-drop adding for folders and sub-folders, flexible multi-column sorting, ripping, burning, file conversion to multiple formats, iPod syncing (with cover art, if possible), and YADB or CDDB look-up. And it would help if it weren’t a ginormous resource hog.
J. River Media Jukebox does all of that. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and am impressed. It’s also free. More or less. I had to purchase an mp3 encoder, which cost US$10. And, for US$40 you can upgrade to J. River Media Center, which will allow you to run your TiVo/TV/sound systems through it, play music through your computer network, and other fancypants stuff, but I’m not really interested. The free version does everything I need, and it does it very nicely.
red paper boat 