R-Comp has released an updated version of MusicMan, their software for organising and playing music collections.
It can play back music in an already organised format – straight from an audio CD if suitable hardware is attached, and when doing so it will make use of your internet connection to look up the CD to display album and track info. However, as a method of organisation, while CDs are fine, they can prove quite bulky if you have a lot – so MusicMan can organise things in a much better way, by ‘ripping’ the music from the CD, encoding it, and storing the resulting files in a structured, friendly way.
The music can be converted into a variety of formats with an emphasis on quality. Information about the track and album – including artwork etc – can be embedded in the final music file, so that whatever software it is used with in future can tell you exactly what it is.
The main focus of the new version has been to improve support for newer platforms, such as the ARMbook and some models of Raspberry Pi – specifically to ensure the audio encoders work on these platforms. A VFP hardware-accelerated MP3 encoder is included with the package, which makes use of the ARMv7 in suitable RISC OS computers to speed up the process of converting music to MP3 format (although FLAC or WAV are recommended above MP3), and this too has been updated.
Reporting problems to the user has also been improved in this version – and R-Comp notes that some people may have missed the update to version 2.18, which added assisted internet-search for album art, and allowed that artwork to be embedded in files.
The software is priced at £29.00 for new users, and can be purchased from !Store. Existing MusicMan 2 users can upgrade free of charge – either via !Store, or upon request to R-Comp if the software hasn’t been bought from (or subsequently registered on) the shop application.
