- Reviews
- Windows
I’ve been listening to a lot more music recently. On iOS, I use Marvis to play my music. On my desktop, I’ve been using Musicbee. I’m a long time user of this program, and briefly covered it on this site in 2015. However, I want to write a better, more detailed review on it, and some of it’s great features that I’ve been using.
MusicBee is jammed packed full of features – from auto silence at the end of a song, to an auto-DJ feature. Because there are simply too many to cover, I’ll be going over the main features and features I use the most.
Customisation is one of the best features of MusicBee – you can customise everything about it. Different skins can be downloaded, allowing you to completely change the theme of the client, and you can also rearrange all the panels, change what information shows, and change to a mini player. I customise my columns in the views a lot – this lets me sort by recently added, which I often use as I binge listen songs I recently added.
Sound quality, of course, matters. Whilst sound quality depends on your setup, music source, and track, MusicBee certainly doesn’t limit it. It features an up to 15 band equaliser to fine tune sound, audio card support, the ability to resample tracks, and so much more. It also features a sound equaliser, which I use a lot. This lets you balance the sound levels of the tracks in your library, as often they have slightly different levels of sound. This means you don’t have to constantly adjust volume in accordance with the tracks volume level, as it can be made uniform across your library.
For those of you that have music with incomplete tags, MusicBee can search the internet for metadata and apply this to your music – this includes cover art. If MusicBee fails to find metadata, you can select to have it scan part of the song and use that to find metadata. This makes it incredibly easy to have a well organised library.
One of my most used, and favourite features, of MusicBee is the auto-playlist feature. This allows you to automatically create a playlist, that is automatically updated, based on certain features. For example, I have a high-rated playlist – this contains my favourite songs, rated four stars or above. This makes it really easy to create playlists that cater to your tastes, without the hassle of managing them – MusicBee does it all.
MusicBee also has some smaller, but useful features. It features last.fm scrobbling, which is useful to see how often you listen to music across devices (Marvis also has last.fm scrobbling support). Queue management is easy to do in MusicBee, allowing you to queue songs that you want to listen to – very useful before playing a game where you don’t want to have to go and select certain tracks.
If you get new music, it’s really easy to add it to MusicBee. Simply hit Insert, and then set the monitored folders. I always import new music to the ‘Inbox’ folder, so I can balance and tag it, before moving it to my library. You can also set MusicBee to scan for music in monitored files on a timed basis.
Despite the amount of power it has, MusicBee is fast, unbloated, and resource friendly. On my current system, with a library of 4 GB, MusicBee uses 0.16% of RAM (16 GB system) – on my older laptop, MusicBee still uses less than 1% of RAM (6 GB system), and has no impact on CPU on either computer. This means that it can be ran – and performance will be great – on any system that can run Windows 7.
I haven’t covered dozens of MusicBee’s features in this review – only the main ones that I use, and that may interest you. MusicBee is lightweight, and it is completely free – no paid features – everything is free. I would strongly recommend MusicBee for those looking for a local music player.
MusicBee can be installed via an executable installer, or via the Windows store to benefit from automatic updates. A portable installer is also offered.
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