With Amazon MP3 and iTunes out of the way- the two immediate giants in the music store world- it's time to turn to some of the smaller services. First off is eMusic.

You might wonder what anything with "iTunes" in the title is doing on a site called Anything but iPod. Well, iTunes made the leap from DRM to DRM free earlier this year, and suddenly the biggest digital music store was open for use with any MP3 player- not only the iPod. 11 million songs and international (albeit not global) availability sounds like a killer combination, but how well does it work for non-iPod MP3 players?

Having gone through an reviewed some of the most popular music organization applications for MP3 players it's time to turn to the other part of the equation: how to get a hold of media in the first place. Amazon MP3 is the first in a series of reviews that will test to see what media stores offer the best value for money, has the best selection and the best overall experience.

Now that the major players (some pun intended) in the field have all been reviewed, it's time to take a look at them all and decide which is the recommended choice for music organization software.

One of the most commonly suggested applications to review on ABi>> has been J. River's software. Unfortunately the Media Center software is $50 and I therefore ignored it at first. Then someone linked to the free Media Jukebox, a stripped down version of the software that will only do music. Read on to see if it's stripped down too much or still has a chance of scoring some points.

While not a competitor to any of the other music organizing applications I've reviewed lately, foobar2000 deserves somewhat of a "special mention" for it's computer side music playback capabilities. Read on for a quick review-slash-walkthrough.

Next up in my series of software reviews is an old champion that hasn't changed much over the last few years. How will it hold up to the more updated music applications?

Continuing my reader requested quest for the best music organizing software, I've made my way to one of the big ones in the field. MediaMonkey has been around for ages, and continues to stand as perhaps the single biggest independent music organizing application out there. Read on to see how it holds up.

With Windows 7 just out , Windows Media Player 12 is slowly making its way onto PCs everywhere, replacing outdated version of a software mane – including me – haven't really had much love for. Considering the amount of people using default applications, and WMP12's ability to use Windows 7 features out of the box, I decided to take a closer look.

Today is the day that Windows users have been waiting for since 2001- the day when Microsoft releases an XP update that isn't complete and utter crap. Unlike Vista, Windows 7 maintains the low profile of Windows XP while also giving the user the interface of Vista. Many people had to skip Vista due to slow or old computers, but with Windows 7 you can run the newest version of Windows on more or less any machine that runs XP- including netbooks.

This is of course an MP3 player website and so computer operating systems isn't normally our business, but the release of Windows 7 does bring a lot of features that directly affects how you use your MP3 player with the OS. Read on for a list of how WIndows 7 will improve your MP3 player experience.

While many people prefer to use pure MSC or MTP drag-and-drop for music organization on their players, others prefer to use MTP's ability to talk with software to manage the content on the player with a music player. Windows Media player, Media Monkey, Winamp - there are many of these programs out there as well as programs made by the player manufacturers themselves.

One of these programs is Songbird. Songbird is an open source, Mozilla based program that both plays back music and lets you organize the music on your MTP player.

The Zune team has been hard at work in the Zune headquarters (cleverly disguised as a library) lately and is now going live with the next milestone, version 2.5. It is a fairly substantial update adding to the social aspect, implementation of auto playlists, better meta data editing, and even a video section where TV shows can now be downloaded. The most interesting I find to be the Gapless playback, since it has always been such an elusive appearing only on a hand full of devices over the years. It may go unnoticed by some, but for the live music listener and or electronic mix fan it’s a feature we longed for.

For the details on all of the latest changes in software/firmware version 2.5 check below for a quick look list and screen shots of the software that should be live in a few hours.

Linux users have in the past been confined to using MSC based MP3 players, ones that act like basic drag and drop memory cards, so choices have been limited. In order to get MTP based devices to work Linux users had to used programs like Gnomad2, Rhythmbox, or Amarok to transfer media to these devices.

In the latest Ubuntu version 8.04 a simple command (sudo apt-get install mtpfs) will install full MTP support. MTPFS provides a full file browsing experience just like an MSC based device with the ability to browse playlists, write playlists, and write metadata to music tracks.

This is great news to MTP only devices like the Creative Zen family, but I also throw out a proposal for the Zune. The Zune uses a modified version of MTP called MTPZ. If this isn’t too modified from MTP, then could this be a slight hack to get full drag and drop Linux support to the Zune?

[Linuxtechie via MTP on Linux Forums]

A while ago I ranted about the major headaches of Windows Media Player 11 and how it fails at being a good desktop media player. There are plenty of things to add to the list, but Jason from Digital Home Thoughts appended my list with some more problem areas.

There is a list of 8 dealing with performance issues and such, but two stand out that are particularly interesting to me: embedded album art and WMP’s obsessive need to sync every possible storage device you plug in.

Let’s face it, Windows Media Player is a dog- its slow, fails to play anything outside of a few major codecs, and it fails to extend its usefulness to portable devices. Microsoft’s own Zune media player even outperforms WMP in many aspects, only failing at more of the hardcore features such as library organization and tag editing.

Ditching the WMP code and building on top of the Zune software or opening the Zune software up to all all MP3 players would be an ideal approach, but I doubt either will happen. So instead here are 3 extremely critical aspects WMP need in order to be a viable media player for the masses.