Musicmatch Jukebox is a software suite that comprises of a set of MP3 tools to rip, tag, manipulate, catalogue, playback and burn MP3's.

Musicmatch has been around for six years and has always been in a corner of our hard drive even when MP3 was not the buzz word that it is today, it has evolved into quite a complex set of elements which did lead to version 6 becoming quite messy in terms of interface, the good news is that V8 is now elegant once more.

In fact the overall look and feel of MMJ has hardly changed with a main control panel and dockable application windows depending which sections of code are in use, its still available as a free version but most of the wanted features including x12 ripping are in the deluxe version which is still not big bucks anyway. The Jukebox application is really a database of all the music on drives that you allow it to manage, if you already have an MP3 collection its a case of pointing the MMJ application at the drive and having a cup of tea while it reads the tags, alternately the MP3 ripper is one of the best around allowing you to quickly rip CD's while information for tagging is pulled from an online database.

The ripping or recording module can write to either MP3, MP3Pro, WMA or WAV and this is closely coupled with what Musicmatch call super tagging not the kind of tagging engine that wears its underpants outside its trousers but it does stop your MP3 library becoming unwieldy, the tagging process matches the correct ID3 characters based on parameters such as filename and connects to the online database to fill in the gaps, you can clean up tags manually if needs be.

Now you need to be fully tagged to use some of the extra features of MMJ8 the auto DJ feature allows you to use the sub genres such as Artist, tempo etc to build a playlist featuring just that kind of music. Replay of a single track or a whole playlist is Childs play and the search utility and explorer type view have evolved over the last 6 years to form an excellent user interface. MMJ8 can also playback just about any audio format you can get your paws on so it can be your one stop shop for music on your network.

So having listened to your music you now want a disc for the car or for friends (legally of course) MMJ8 deluxe allows you to build playlists and burn them directly to disc in a variety of formats but the most useful is as a WAV file so they will playback in standard CD players. When burning you can also use volume levelling to try and iron out those fluctuations between tracks that make you reach for the volume control.

Other good inbuilt features include album art, visualisations, CD label printing, Slideshow and even line in recording for getting all that vinyl to MP3 format, but most of the extras are online services. Music Match radio allows you to stream a radio station that you build in the best quality you connection can support, also you can get music recommendations while listening on MMJ8 which include biographies and full artist / group album listings.

Having a large collection of MP3 tracks you will probably have an MP3 player, no worries here either MMJ8 comes with a range of downloadable plugins for most of the popular MP3 portables including apples Ipod, we have had a few funnies with the Ipod which point to the ID3 tagging being at fault but after a clean up and re load our Ipod is happy again.

Online Musicmatch have started to offer MMJ downloads at 99 cents a track, not sure if this service will speed to European users but there seems to be good demand and if it can be fully integrated with MMJ8 or 9 then its bound to be attractive.

So to pricing, the basic player is free and still going strong after 6 years, you can buy a disc but its easier to download from www.musicmatch.com MMJ8 plus (the deluxe version) is currently $19.99 which is about £11.60 in UK money, for £23 you can get all future versions of MMJ, we'd recommend this as Musicmatch constantly add new features and this is good value.

MMJ8 will run on a PC running windows 98ME upwards and needs a 1ghz processor with 128mb ram and 150mb disk space, currently our friends with apples will have to make do with itunes!

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