MusicBee

All too often we encounter music players that are either lacking basic features or crammed with features that aren’t particularly useful. MusicBee is one of those rare programs that covers all the basics and includes some pretty cool extras. If you’re in the market for a new way to manage your music collection, you should take a look at it.

The program’s interface is plain and intuitive, with a list of tracks dominating the center of the screen and a list of directories down the left side, just like many other music players. If you have songs with incomplete album information, MusicBee can automatically search for and update that information for you, and it has several other tools to help you organize your music collection. The auto DJ feature is much more than just a song shuffler; with this function of the program you can customize the way that songs are selected, choosing tracks that are similar to the seed song, favoring more highly rated tracks, setting a minimum gap before the same artist is repeated, and much more. MusicBee also provides access to a wide variety of Internet radio stations, as well as local concert listings and upcoming album releases. The program’s online Help file is well written and thorough. Overall, we were quite impressed with MusicBee; it was easy to use and brought several really useful features together in a way that we hadn’t seen before.

MusicBee comes as a ZIP file but installs and uninstalls without issues.