Like a lot of people, I find it hard to escape the pull of the ubiquitous Apple Computer and their wonderful little gadgets. iPhones, iMacs, iPods and the super sexy Macbook Air all get my inner geek salivating. On a related note, I have a lot of music - 24,188 songs as of today, to be precise, most of it - nay, all of it - in MP3 format (the scary part is that I have friends who make my collection look like a few random tracks ripped from some forgotten Mini-Pops CDs). I'm also the kind of guy that likes to have music in the background at all times, and these two things combined mean that I have to have a good way to organize the ridiculous amount of songs I have stashed in the dark and dingy corners of my hard drives. For the longest time, I was using iTunes, which did just fine - for a while. I've asked around a lot, and while most people use iTunes, not a lot of them can tell me why they use it. "Because everyone else does" seems to be the most common answer. But once my music library started to get larger and larger, and Apple started to release newer and more complex versions of iTunes, I noticed that it was slowing down... taking longer to load and run, having compatibility issues with other programs and devices, etc, etc. So I did some searching around and tried a few other programs, and have settled on what I think is the best one around - MediaMonkey.

I had been using an older version of MediaMonkey for about a year, but I just bought a new 500GB hard drive to store my growing music collection, so I decided it was time for an upgrade. I have the newest release of the program - 3.0.2 - and am really wowed by the improvements that Ventis Media (the developers) have made. As soon as you install the program, it searches your hard drive for compatible files, and then essentially says "Hey, here's what I got, what do you think?"

The layout is big, bright and easy to navigate, with a familiar tree structure on the left to navigate between artist, genre, album, year, rating, etc. The main window shows the songs inside the currently selected folder/playlist, while the right window shows you what's currently playing. The play/pause button and other controls line the bottom, while the top of the screen gives you view options and allows you to change the attributes of how the program works. Most of the windows can be resized to fit whatever you're doing. It's all very well laid out and intuitive and easy to use.

It's easy to hook up an iPod or any other music device you have, and doesn't waste time messing with silly DRM or anything like that. It's fast, small, light and never crashes - at least, not yet. It also has a really comprehensive tag editor that's easy and fast to use. Highly recommended