Mp3nity

Too many music lovers rely on their media player’s library and file management features, which too often aren’t up to the task of finding, organizing, and even playing all your music files, not just MP3s. Mp3nity is a free all-in-one music file organizer, manager, converter, and even player. It can rip CDs, generate playlists, and convert and compress files. It has some unique tools for managing large numbers of files simultaneously, including editing tags, renaming files, and fetching updated information online.

Mp3nity has an efficient layout that does a good job displaying tons of information, though of course the entire display can be customized. The toolbar has colorful, clearly labeled icons, including an integrated media player that maintained its size and position no matter how we resized the main display, which is a nice touch. We browsed the small tree view to a music archive and opted to select both folder and subfolders, and Mp3nity quickly indexed and displayed the contents in a track information window with active entry fields for easy editing and a larger information window that had tabs for lyrics, pictures, Web links, and more. Right-clicking any song title let us choose a wide range of operations, including an impressive array of options for converting or compressing files. We selected some random titles to play, which the media player did with aplomb. Fetching tags online was fun; a click or two retrieved detailed information on some fairly obscure titles, while another click automatically populated the data. The Auto Update button lets Mp3nity save automatically updated files, and the toolbar also offers built-in controls for parsing files and exporting tables.

The only issue we encountered with Mp3nity was with older MPEG 1.0 and 2.0 files, which we could neither play nor convert with Mp3nity, thought they played fine in VLC media player. This only affected maybe four or five files out of thousands, so it’s about as minor as quibbles get, and it’s more than made up by Mp3nity’s many advantages. We particularly liked the capability to quickly select directories from the tree view since we like to keep the actual data files in several locations. It also had no trouble playing our AAC files, so iTunes users should find it easy to switch.