This being classical music, I'd like that to say 'Composer', for example. For starters, the name 'Album Artist' at the top of the left-hand column is a bit jarring. There are a few things that aren't quite right, though. It's spacious, so nothing feels too cramped it's using album art appropriately, so you immediately recognise your music it's a basic three-column design, with all your 'artists' listed in a tall, scrollable column at the left, the albums listed in the large middle pane, and the right-most column displaying the play queue (plus, at the bottom, the album art associated with the currently-playing track, if there is one). There'splenty to like about this display. Once the music scan has completed, the main program window will then be displayed. At least MusicBee makes the wait bearable by showing you exactly how far it's got (and, by implication) and how far it has yet to go! It is slightly unfortunate that nothing is visible in the main program window for playing until all music tracks have been scanned and fetched, but that's not exactly unusual for most media players I've reviewed of late. 658 of 55,762' message at the bottom of the dialog box: so many music players leave you guessing if anything is happening as you scan for music! It's nice to see a counter updated in real-time: A very nice thing to see is the 'Scanning. you can click the button and the music fetching process will begin. Once back at the original 'Scan for Files.' dialog, with the correct network home of your music properly specified: A click of the button, however, lets you navigate, as you can see in the foreground, round your home network, so you can select from there directly, without having to map a network drive first. Notice thatthe original file searching dialog (in the background of the above screenshot) only shows local drives. Notice that the user's own local Music directory (and the Public equivalent) are switched on by default -which means having to turn those folders off, clicking and then navigating to where your network-stored music is actually to be found: Next, you get asked where your music files are lurking, so MusicBee can start scanning them and adding them to its database: If so, that's good for those of us on this side of The Pond! There are 16 non-English languages to choose from, which seems pretty comprehensive for a free piece of software! To start with, choose a language:Įnglish users get a choice between 'English' (as shown) and 'English (US)': I was quite pleased that the US version of the language wasn't the default when I ran the program -but that may be because it's reading my laptop's default keyboard or language settings (which are UK English by default). Once you launch the program, you get prompted for a few things. It's a nice, short, sharp installer! When it completes, you can launch the program directly as you click. Once you agree to the license, you get to choose where to install the software: just click to accept the default suggestion and then things immediately start getting copied to your hard disk. It's not too onerous, but it's a shame it's a proprietary product, no matter how free of monetary cost it is. This one's not too bad as it goes, except that it clearly isn't an open source license, as it restricts you in many ways (such as no decompiling, reverse engineering and so on). You then get to agree to an End User License Agreement (EULA). A standard installer will then appear:Īs usual, just click to get things underway. Maybe they think people's browsers will show dire warnings when you try to download an EXE? It's slightly annoying to have to download something and then unpack it before you can use it, is all I'm saying!Īnyway: run the exe file after unpacking it. For unknown reasons, it is downloaded as a ZIP file which, when you unpack it, contains a single file called MusicBeeSetup_3_3_Update1.exe (at the time of writing): why you can't just download the EXE, I don't know. There is also a Windows Store version, but I didn't try that one as I have nothing to do with the Windows Store! The Installer Edition download was a pleasingly-small 8.7MB. As seems to be common these days, you can either download a 'portable' version (means it can run directly after unzipping, without being formally installed anywhere), or the full-on, traditional 'Installer Edition'. MusicBee is available for free download at the MusicBee website.
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