This will come as a shock to any­body who knows me, but I’ve all but stopped using foobar2000. A cou­ple months ago on the indi­etor­rents forums, some­body men­tioned MP3Toys, and I’ve been using it almost exclu­sively since.

As I men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous post, all the chores I was made to do in foo­bar seemed to keep me from lis­ten­ing to music: I was work­ing for my soft­ware, and not vice-versa. My col­lec­tion of music felt cold and dead and frag­ile in the hands of foo­bar, and none of the fea­tures I had ide­al­ized in my mind were any­where near fruition (true hot­ness, similarity-by-mood fil­ters, etc.). I des­per­ately wanted some­thing to get me back in touch with my music, some­thing that deliv­ered music to me in a way that felt as nat­ural as buy­ing a CD and putting it in my stereo. I even con­sid­ered switch­ing to iTunes.

MP3Toys isn’t for every foo­bar user; I just got lucky enough that it emu­lates my ideal behav­ior in foo­bar. It’s a liv­ing, breath­ing pro­gram, and using it is a human­is­tic expe­ri­ence. It under­stands not just that you lis­ten to music, but why you lis­ten to music. Some of its intel­li­gent fea­tures include:

• Album art stor­age: Sure, I’ve spent count­less hours col­lect­ing album art for all the music on my hard drive, and MP3Toys can’t use it. But what it can do is auto­mat­i­cally down­load art from Ama­zon and store it in each album’s folder. And for the art that isn’t avail­able on Ama­zon, there is a built-in “Search RateY­our­Mu­sic” launcher, among other engines, and images can be dragged onto albums from both Win­dows Explorer and any web browser.
• Album art dis­play: MP3Toys places so much empha­sis on album art that not only is the cover of the cur­rently play­ing album promi­nently dis­played in the cen­ter of the win­dow, but your entire library is dis­played as album art. This may seem cum­ber­some with a large col­lec­tion, but with MP3Toys’ search­ing and fil­ter­ing options, brows­ing your music is a breeze. Addi­tion­ally — and this may seem triv­ial, but — when music is play­ing and you haven’t touched your mouse for a while, MP3Toys blows up the cur­rent album art to occupy the whole screen. That’s just cool.
• Disk mon­i­tor: I hate TSR pro­grams, but MP3Toys’ sys­tem tray disk mon­i­tor is worth it. This small pro­gram watches your music direc­to­ries for changes and addi­tions, which means that MP3Toys’ library is a live and accu­rate reflec­tion of the con­tents of your hard drive. Never again will some down­loaded album be lost among a dozen oth­ers. What this also means is that, when a tor­rent fin­ishes in the back­ground, I can watch the new album sim­ply mate­ri­al­ize in MP3Toys’ browser, with the cor­re­spond­ing album art downloaded.
• Library fil­ters: The album-panning browser in the lower por­tion of the screen can be fil­tered and sorted in a num­ber of ways (by folder, rat­ing, last played, decade, etc.), but the best in my opin­ion is the “New” fil­ter. Click­ing “New” dis­plays only albums you’ve acquired in the last three months, sorted by how recently they were added to your hard drive — like the stack of CDs on your desk from your trip to the record store.
• Charts and his­tory: One thing that really won me over is MP3Toys’ charts fea­ture, which behaves almost exactly like the hot­ness algo­rithm I’ve been devel­op­ing for over a year. The vertically-sorted charts con­sider both how much you’ve lis­tened to an album (in total dura­tion, not just by track count), and how recently you’ve lis­tened to an album (with more recent lis­tens posi­tioned higher in the charts). Sim­ply bril­liant. The his­tory list needs no expla­na­tion, but is really con­ve­nient as well. Both sur­pass foobar’s abil­i­ties in these regards, in large part because they think in terms of albums — not songs.

These are the fea­tures that, more than any other, make MP3Toys the most well-designed music juke­box I’ve used — and I’ve used a lot. Fur­ther­more, its lone devel­oper, Robert Frahm, is almost unbe­liev­ably respon­sive to user feed­back. Even while I was still in trial mode, he was respond­ing to my forum posts within 24 hours, often releas­ing small upgrades to address the issues I brought up. This degree of ded­i­ca­tion to such an already impres­sive pro­gram led me to actu­ally pay for it, some­thing I’ve only done a hand­ful of times.

So what if I don’t make absolutely sure that every tag is accu­rate and spelled and punc­tu­ated cor­rectly? If that’s the cost of hav­ing a fluid music player that is grounded in real­ity, and not some the­o­ret­i­cal realm of stan­dards and uni­ver­sal adapt­abil­ity, so be it. The playlist, queue, and tag edi­tor are fea­tures I’m not entirely com­fort­able with yet, but I’ll get there. In the mean­time, I’m lis­ten­ing to music again.