MusicMatch 6.0 Streams the Music You Want

Picking the right digital-music jukebox software can be about as difficult as choosing a good melon at the grocery store: All seem to offer similar playback, storage, and organization features, but when you peel off the skin, you find that some jukeboxes have ripened much more than others.

Take the recently updated MusicMatch Jukebox 6.0, for example. Available in a free version and a $19.95 Plus version (not reviewed here), MusicMatch supports playback of .mp3, .wav, .wma, and Dolby AAC files, and offers solid controls, CD-quality ripping, and CD burning (in .mp3, .wav, and .wma formats). In an effort to further differentiate itself from the pack, MusicMatch lets you personalize your jukebox by combining customization on the desktop with music recommendations from the Web. But be warned: MusicMatch Jukebox can be a real resource hog. On the 550-MHz Pentium III system with 128MB RAM that we used for testing, MusicMatch Jukebox caused occasional bottlenecks when we tried to use other open applications at the same time.

A Glossy New Veneer

On the surface, MusicMatch Jukebox features a much improved user interface--complete with accessible controls and a new default skin called Neutronium, a vast improvement over the previous default, which resembled an old, boxy wooden console. Unfortunately only three MusicMatch Jukebox skins come in the installation file; if you want additional ones, you must download them separately.

Because the MusicMatch Jukebox interface is modular, you can separate, close, and arrange its control windows individually. The default configuration consists of a player window (with Record, Play, Stop, and Pause buttons), a media window, and a playlist window, all of which sit above a large music library and Web services window.

A new Minimize option lets you shrink the jukebox down to just the player controls--useful for people who simply want to play music without taking up a lot of screen real estate. The Media window, for displaying videos and album art, can now be enlarged for half-screen video viewing. When we tested it, the quality of the video remained fairly constant as we enlarged the window, but when we switched applications to read an e-mail message and returned to MusicMatch, the player interface covered the Media window. As welcome as the improvements are, we still feel that MusicMatch's interface is a bit cluttered.

There are other improvements to the interface. Alongside the playback controls is the Playlist window, which is divided into tabs for music files on your hard drive, tracks on the CD in your optical drive, or songs on the radio. It even has visible controls to select, clear, shuffle, repeat, and burn songs. Previous releases hid these controls in pull-down menus.

In the default configuration, beneath the playback controls, is the Music Library view, where you organize your catalog and access Web components such as MusicMatch radio stations, MusicMatch.com's music guide with news, and searchable listings. You can also purchase options and discography data from Gracenote's CDDB service. Like Windows Media Player 7, this window makes content from the Web accessible from within the jukebox itself; there's no need to launch a separate browser view.

When you first install and launch MusicMatch, a help window pops up with icons for the various features. MusicMatch automatically finds and adds to your library all compatible music files on your hard drive.