The great popularity of MP3 files has resulted in a boon for the audio playing, ripping, burning, encoding and organizational software selection. Jukeboxes attempt to combine all of the features found in other audio playback and management software into one package capable of providing all of your digital audio needs and desires.

While there is a huge and constantly growing number of software Jukeboxes available, just a small few are the clear leaders in this category. After an in-depth review of each of these programs, our recommendations became clear. However, you may be looking for specific features or want support for a portable player you own, so we have also put together a feature comparison and portable player support charts.

Recommendations

Best Overall
MusicMatch Jukebox has long been the top Jukebox and has continually grown over several versions, each providing major feature additions and improvements over the previous, resulting in the tightest integration of powerful features in a polished, easy to use and very customizable interface. Other jukebox software may offer some additional features, but MusicMatch Jukebox simply provides the most enjoyable experience and more than enough features for most users.

Most Features
Media Jukebox provides such a large number of features, it may be the best choice for power users. It includes the largest selection of DSP, visualization and portable player plug-ins, skins, file format support and hardware support, including video support for TV Tuners and DVD drives. Additionally, it offers a number of unique features not found in any of the others, such as an automatically created list of your favorite music, play/record scheduling, an audio file editor and access to your media files from another Media Jukebox over the Internet. Media Jukebox does fall short however, in some critical areas that make it less desirable for day-to-day use. It has many bugs and occasionally crashes and the interface is somewhat cluttered and sometimes clumsy feeling, when compared to MusicMatch Jukebox.

Worth Mention
Siren Jukebox stands out for having fast and the most flexible organization features, including fully customizable fields, extensive grouping, sorting, and filtering with an unlimited number of customizable views. It is also the first of the top jukeboxes to provide WMDM support, which results in greater portable device support. A major drawback however, is only minimal ID3 tag support is provided. After entering any custom information (besides basic song title, artist, album and genre), the information is only available within Siren (unavailable in other software).

Real Jukebox includes most of the powerful features found in the other top Jukeboxes and has especially impressive visualization plug-ins, but falls short because too much effort is put into marketing and not enough into customer satisfaction. The setup asks you to join their hundred mailing lists multiple times, adds icons all over your system - whether you ask for them or not and adds a program to your system's start-up without asking. The free version also has severe limitations, when compared to the other Jukeboxes and has occasional crashes and had to be reinstalled several times during testing. So while Real Jukebox is a quality program in many ways, these factors make it a nauseants to setup and therefor difficult to recommend.

Feature Comparison

Portable Player Support

At the time of this writing (Feb. 2001), portable player support is pretty spotty. However, many jukeboxes and portable players are beginning to incorporate WMDM support into their products, which should help dramatically broaden portable player support in the near future. Siren already provides WMDM support and MusicMatch Jukebox and RioPort have also announced plans to add WMDM support as well.