MediaMonkey is not the same anymore

MediaMonkey used to be my music player of choice for many reasons: it wasn't hard on the CPU, it was easy to use, it could handle my music library with ease, made it quick to find anything I wanted to hear, and most of all, it simply worked.

That is not the case anymore. After spending some time without using MediaMonkey (and Windows at all) I expected it to still be the same fantastic piece of software I was used to. Quite frankly, I am very disappointed. Somewhere in the way from there to here something went terribly wrong and now MediaMonkey barely serves as a ordinary music player. 

Back then I would gladly pay to use the extended version. Today, I'm giving up using it at all. At first there was the last.fm issue. It simply never worked the way it should, even though the people over at Ventis Media claim it to be "Winamp-compatible", that just does not seem to be the case. The last.fm client software utterly fails to acknowledge the very existence of the player. 

Another negative point on the new version of MediaMonkey is its music library. A feature that was absolutely perfect is now a complete piece of crap. It doesn't behave correctly, makes it completely impossible to add album art to files, and sometimes it even refuses to acknowledge that there are new files on the music folder. No matter what I do, it seems to be impossible for it to understand that there are new files to be read and added to the library. Even though they are in the correct places, with correct names and completely filled tags, no matter what I do they simply do not show up in MediaMonkey. I even tried completely resetting the library database and reconstructing it from scratch, to no avail. 

Unless I can find the original version, the one I liked so much, I'm leaving it behind.

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Samples and memories

This is what's left of my masters: a box full of samples. The picture above, which I took a few minutes ago, is from a box where I stored all samples and materials I used in my work for my masters degree.

Actually, not all the materials are in the box - some of them, especially eppendorfs - are not in the picture. I intend to clean and reutilise them - after all it would be a huge waste if I stored a bunch of empty, perfectly useful vials in a box never to be looked at again.Even these materials, I'm keeping only for a few years. I'll probably use the same box to store stuff from my PhD, and then throw its current content away. Or recycle it, if possible.

Looking at it I can recall a lot of memories of all the work I've done, which doesn't seem to have been that much, but at the time the task seemed somehow unattainable. But in the end, even with all the stress, all the problems I've had to solve, all the rights and wrongs, I see it was worth it.

I already have my diploma, my degree and my dissertation, but seeing this box is what ultimately gives me a sense of completion, of a work that has been finally finished.

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