MusicBee 3.1

MusicBee is intended to help you organize your music collection and play your favorite songs. The program searches the selected local folders and iTunes database to create a music library, and, fortunately, there is smart tagging to fill in metadata, such as artwork and lyrics. Yet, this does not mean that you cannot edit tags manually as well. The tool can also play streaming contents and allows podcast downloading.

The player has a nice interface that can be customized in many ways. There is the possibility of changing skins, and believe me, there are a lot of them available! Also, you can shift views according to the type of tasks you are doing. These include mini-player, compact player, full view and theater mode. Surprisingly, you can even add new tabs to match your exact needs.

Versatile play list creation is also an important advantage of this player. So, you can simply scan through the library or browse folders while adding new songs as you normally do. But you can also have the tool create music lists automatically, including, for example, the most frequently played songs. Moreover, it can help you keep track of the upcoming releases.

Let us talk about playback quality, for, what kind of player would it be if it did not guarantee quality after all? Fortunately, the player allows optimizing playback according to your necessities and your hardware capabilities. It is good to know that it comes with a 15-band equalizer and supports DPS effects. Likewise, it can take advantage of high-end sound cards supporting WASAPI and ASIO. Not only that, the player can upmix stereo to 5.1 surround sound or, reversely, resample audio to lower bitrates. Another feature worth mentioning is format conversion; it supports only MP3 and WAV transcoding, though.

In fewer words, I have no doubt that MusicBee is one of the leading products of its type. Luckily, you can add new features by downloading and installing add-ons, such as WinAmp plugins, which you can use to enhance your listening experience. I cannot think of many inconveniences of using this program, but one could be that it takes you some time to learn to use all its features. And since the product is absolutely free to use, you can start exploring them since now.