If you're new to digital music management, you may want to take a minute to learn some of the basic concepts used in MediaMonkey. Otherwise, you can proceed directly to Getting Started.
The Library is a database of all of your CD albums and audio Tracks. Any album or Track that appears in the database is a record of an album or Track that physically exists, either in a drawer somewhere (one of your CD albums), on your hard drive (e.g. MP3 files), or on a network. The benefit of having your music stored in a database is that you can quickly search your collection of thousands of files for a single file, and/or organize the files very quickly.
To organize your music, you first need to add it to the Library. Once a song is part of the Library, MediaMonkey makes it easy for you to perform operations on the actual file, so that any operation can be performed on both the Library and the File. For example:
Most media players support several digital audio file formats natively, and others via plug-ins. Some of these formats (e.g. a standard Audio CD) are uncompressed, whereas others (e.g. MP3) are compressed. An uncompressed Audio CD can take up close to 700 MB on your hard drive, whereas the same audio in a compressed format often uses less than 20% of the space. MediaMonkey is able to 'Rip' audio from an Audio CD and saving it to your hard drive in a compressed format.
Audio compression can be lossless or lossy. Lossless audio compression compresses the audio without losing any of the original audio signal's integrity. Consequently, an audio Track that is compressed with lossless compression can be converted back to its original uncompressed form. Lossy compression on the other hand, takes advantage of the fact that the human auditory system doesn't notice certain types of signal degradations, thereby achieving much higher compression ratios. The tradeoff, of course, is that depending on the algorithm used and the compression ratio chosen, lossy compression can introduce artifacts that may be apparent, especially as the compression ratio increases.
What follows is a brief description of some of the various formats supported natively by MediaMonkey to help you choose the ideal format for your digital music collection:
CDA: CDA (CD Audio) files are the uncompressed files that appear on a purchased Audio CD. They can be played by most players, or ripped to compressed formats to save disk space.
WAV: WAV files are uncompressed and as such, are usually only used for audio Tracks that are not longer than a few seconds. Some users with plenty of hard drive space will convert Audio CDs Tracks to wav files because they are almost universally supported, however, generally, this is not an efficient use of hard drive space.
MP3: MP3 is the most ubiquitous lossy compression format, and MP3 files can be played by most portable digital audio players and many DVD players. MP3s are often ripped at 128 Kbps, achieving decent quality, although the discerning audiophile will often notice artifacts at this bitrate and choose to encode them at a higher bitrate (160 or 192 Kbps).
WMA: WMA (Windows Media Audio) files use a Microsoft format, that, like MP3, is lossy. It isn't as ubiquitous as MP3, due in part to the fact that it is perceived as a proprietary format and is supported on fewer devices and DVDs than MP3. On the positive side, though, WMA files have noticably better quality than MP3 files encoded at equivalent bitrates.
OGG: OGG is a relatively new format, that like MP3/WMA, is lossy, but is generally considered to be equivalent or better in quality compared to MP3 files encoded at similar bitrates. What distinguishes OGG from MP3 and WMA is that the format is an open specification and may be distributed freely, meaning that any company can use it at no cost. Because it is relatively new, few devices support OGG, however, this is likely to change in the near future. For best quality, OGG files are generally encoded at a setting of quality=5 which results in bitrates of ~140-150 Kbps (OGG only uses as much bandwidth as is required).
MediaMonkey can play several other formats through plug-ins though these formats must be encoded with another application:
MPC: MPC is a lossy compressed format that is considered to be one of the best codecs at moderate to high bitrates. At lower bandwidths of 128 Kbps, any benefits over OGG or WMA are less clear. The most significant downside to MPC is that as of today, no hardware devices or portable audio players support the format. MediaMonkey tags and plays MPC files out-of-the-box, but does not yet support encoding.
FLAC and Monkey's Audio (APE) are both lossless compressed formats. This means that they can store a complete CD in ~1/3 the space of a standard CD without any loss in audio fidelity. MediaMonkey support tagging of APE files but does not yet encode them..
AAC: AAC is a lossy compressed format popularized by Apple's iTunes store. Like OGG and WMA, it is an improvement over MP3, but though it is building in momentum, it does not yet have the support of most portable audio players.
Ultimately, the decision of what format to use for your audio collection is a personal one, involving tradeoffs between audio quality, hard disk space, portability, and future-proofing. For most, MP3 is perfectly adequate and its widespread support makes it a no brainer.
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Most digitally encoded file formats also allow Track information to be embedded within the file. For instance, you may have a file 'Bryan Adams - Summer of '69.mp3' in which the filename tells you the Artist and the Title, however, if you wanted to also store information about Album, Track #, Year, Music Genre, Rating, Lyrics, etc. you'd need to store this information in Tags that are embedded within the file.
MediaMonkey allows you to store all sorts of information about a Track within the Library, and to update tags when changes are made to this information. Although the information is stored in the MediaMonkey Library, there are 2 reasons for also updating this information within the track tags as well:
1) If the Track is shared with an external device such as an MP3 Player or DVD, the tag allows that information to be available via the device (assuming the device supports tags).
2) If you wish to use another player or music manager, the tags embedded within your songs can often be read by those applications.
Tags are usually stored in a format that is designed specifically for the file type. e.g. MP3 files usually have ID3 tags wherease OGG files have OGG tags. What follows is a brief discussion of the different tag formats supported in MediaMonkey:
ID3v1: ID3v1 is the lowest common denominator of MP3 tag formats. It stores only a very limited amount of information (e.g. Artist, Title, Album, etc.) however, it is supported almost universally by portable audio players and DVD players.
ID3V2: ID3v2 tags are also used for MP3 files. They support a much greater range of metadata (information about your music files) than ID3v1, however, some information encoded in ID3v2 tags may not be readable by another application or device that also supports ID3v2. For this reason, it's usually a good idea to store music data in both ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags.
OGG and WMA files have there own standard tag formats. There's no need for alternatives since the specification supports as much metadata as would be needed in a relatively unambiguos manner.
APE and MPC files use APE2 tags, which are designed to resolve some of the difficulties with ID3v2. Although they work very well, there is limited support for them in portable audio players and DVD players.
Related Information: