Product Review: Musicmatch Jukebox Software

About the company: "Musicmatch's combination of personalized music software and services lets music fans manage their music and listening environment in one place. With Musicmatch Jukebox and music services, consumers can buy, record, burn, download, discover, enjoy and organize an entire music collection. At the same time, Musicmatch delivers exceptional personalization through technology not available elsewhere. The patent-pending Musicmatch personalization system learns from millions of community members to deliver tailored music, artist recommendations and valuable services unique to a listener's own tastes."

The big pitch: The internet's best (and free!) music jukebox software. Play and organize your music collection, create custom playlists, burn and rip your own music CDs, and transfer music to your MP3 player - at no cost!

When people talk about music software, they inevitably either mean Windows Media Player, or Apple's iTunes. But those people are missing one very big, very good, very free addition to the jukebox software field - Yahoo's incredible MusicMatch Jukebox 10.

Never heard of it? That's kind of the problem - MusicMatch leaves iTunes and Windows Media for dead in just about every category, from the free music playing software, to the 'pay per download' music store that sits behind it. But the real beauty of Yahoo's MusicMatch store is that, even without paying a cent, you can get a whole lot of value out of it, including an hour per day of MusicMatch's Artist Match radio, which is AWESOME.

Here's how it works. When you start up MusicMatch Jukebox 10, you click on the 'radio' tab, which gives you a whole host of free radio stations that you can listen to to your heart's content without spending a cent. These range from hip-hop to comedy to world music to techno, but the real gem in the rough is the Artist Match option.

First, type in the name of your favorite band. Let's say you're digging Dashboard Confessional right now (I know we are), so you type them in. What you get next is a page of their music that you can, if you want, sample for free, or download. But hit the 'artist match' button and you get one hour of random music from other bands that MusicMatch says are very close to Dashboard Confessional's style. In this case, we get music from The Shins, Something Corporate, Jimmy Eat World, The Ataris, Brand New, Matchbook Romance, Death Cab for Cutie, The Used, Senses Fail, Incubus, Boxcar Racer, John Mayer and the always amazing Bright Eyes, among others.

Now in case you don't understand the gravity of this, remember all those times you got bored of commercial radio playing the same bands over and over? Haven't you ever wanted a way to find new bands that are similar in style to stuff you already like? Well here it is.

MusicMatch's Artist Match radio, even if you decide not to spend a cent on monthly subscriptions and pay-per-download tracks, gives you a litany of bands you've never heard of, but which you will absolutely like enough to pursue in the future. And if you REALLY like what you hear, you can purchase the track for download with a single click of the mouse.

And even if you don't, an hour per day of music focused on your own likes and dislikes is an incredible deal - especially for free.

We LOVE this software, and the service behind it is a heck of a deal too, at just $19.95 for the premium service, but because we're cheapskates we use ArtistMatch to find new bands, and then we download the hell out of them, using MusicMatch to play the downloads later. It's a great deal, and MusicMatch also allows us to burn CDs, rip tracks, send music to an MP3 player, burn MP3's, and they even offer personalized tech support.

Yahoo may be a huge company devoted to eating all their competitors and spitting out the bones, but in the case of MusicMatch, they simply have the greatest piece of jukebox software available. And it's free!

The Product Trends rating: Absolutely five stars. This is a piece of software that leaves iTunes and Real Player in the dust, with a music store behind it that competes very well with anyone else out there. MusicMatch gets our strongest recommendation. And it's free - try it now!

To try MusicMatch for yourself, click the image below:

posted by Oz @ 6:26 PM