Ok, this is really ridiculous. I thought I’d give MusicMatch Jukebox one more chance, but this thing is truly a piece of crap that’s been getting more bloated with every release. This is Version 10 which I installed about a month ago. Check this out:

I’m looking at Process Explorer right now with the player open. There are 3 separate EXE’s running in Task manager totaling a whopping 45 megs of memory. 45 megs for a music player??? Not only that – I’m listening to some music from their online radio streaming station and my computer is currently running at 80% CPU all coming from MMJ. Shut down the stream and the play remains at 80 percent CPU. Shutting down the player gets my CPU back.

I had previous uninstalled and re-installed MMJB because of this CPU usage and I figured it must have something to do with my configuration on my machine. Right after the re-install the player wasn’t sucking CPU, but after a couple re-boots it’s now back to using an insane amount of CPU.

So next, I thought well maybe I try tech support. There’s a help menu option for get support. Click on that – you go to a Web page. A Web Page that says: Use the “Request Support” to submit the problem to us. Except the freaking feature doesn’t work - it takes you back to the same Web page that shows a huge page of steps you should go through once the “Request Support“ button is pressed (apparently it's some internal status reporting tool. Nice idea too bad it doesn't work... No other avenue submit a problem report. I searched around for a few minutes trying to find another support or contact link, but it’s either not there or hidden out of sight on purpose.

How pathetic is that?

The latter trend of trying to get support or even just contact the company has gotten to be a real PITA with a lot of “new media” companies. This is an obvious scheme to minimize solicitation – and poor customer support. For a company like MusicMatch that wants customer loyality so you buy their services that’s extremely poor form.

They certainly will not sell me anything from their shitty radio stations that re-gurgirate the same 3 commercial songs over and over again. In Alternative I get to listen to SlipKnot every 5 minutes - talk about a mismatched target <g>. An effort to provide some decent streaming content would be nice, but most of the ‘official’ stations that the major players include are the same crap. This isn’t a medium limited by bandwidth as the radio waves, so it’s a mystery to me why there can’t be a bit more diversity. You can find it but certainly not out of the box of the music players – you have to go to Shoutcast or the like and dig.

While I’m on the topic of music players – I’ve tried a fair number of them (although not recently) and I’ve been pretty disappointed with almost all of them. Personally I just want a basic play that does three things well:

• Play Music easily and have an easy way to get at audio from my hard disk
• Burn high quality MP3s of my music (which originally was the reason I used MusicMatch because it’s encoder sounded much better than most of the others at the time)
• Export the content to my IPod easily

The latter has been a major pain in the ass. MusicMatch was worthless for this actually because it was so slow that it took longer than the battery of the IPod could handle – it would shut down half way through. This isn’t really MusicMatch’s fault – it’s the silly COM interfaces/Service that the IPod uses to shuffle files across.

I’ve been using EphPod which is nice synchronization utility that bypasses the Apple Service/COM interface and relatively quickly can synchronize an entire music library. It can also create playlists for every album with a click of a button – a feature I haven’t seen in any other music player.

The whole concept of playlists is way overrated anyway. Maybe I’m just old fashioned but I like to listen to an album rather than constantly jumbling around my music list. I have too much music that is too diverse to go completely at random and there’s too much music that’s not categorized.

It’s pretty sad that we have this cool technology (music players that can hold just about all of our music) and we’re falling short on the software end trying to organize this huge amount of data in a way that makes sense.