How does it work ?
Is there anything better ?
Thanks.
I’m very happy with MusicMatch but I know there are some detractors around.
I find the organization system very simple and the ripping and burning to be sweet.
And the MM store is useful too. They almost always have what I’m looking for in terms of songs.
There’s a high likelihood it’s spyware. Mostly I prefer winamp 5. Heck, I’d use windows media player first.
It came included when I bought an mp3 player from Intel, a company which I would think is smarter than to give out spyware.
I like it pretty well. Are you referring to the playing/organizing aspects of it, or the downloads?
I want to buy and download music with it, then burn some CDs.
Do you have any particular basis for this assertion? I can assure you that it generates no spyware like behaviour and doesn’t even dial home unless it needs album info. I’m quite paranoid about this stuff and unless it can magically hide its traffic I’m pretty sure it’s fine.
To answer the OP, I use and like Musicmatch. Mostly I use it to rip my CD collection to my computer for use as a giant jukebox. I haven’t used the CD burning or shop capabilities.
I installed MusicMatch because it came with my iPod.
I uninstalled it after a while, though.
I did not want to use it as my default media player, but periodically it would reset its options so it would be my default media player - even though I had set it up specifically to NOT be my default and had set up another program specifically to BE my default.
It was a little presumptuous for my taste, so I uninstalled it. Ha! That taught it! 
To elaborate, I used it for my CD collection initially (it came with a new Dell I had delivered). After taking 9 months to rip (and catalog) my whole collection I will say their ‘auto-label’ feature is pretty complete. Even my obscure stuff it was mostly able to identify.
When I got out here to Ohio and realized that there wasn’t a music store within 20 miles I started using it to purchase individual tracks (99 cents each) and have been very happy with the quality. Occasionally they haven’t had what I’m looking for (why the Meat Puppets only have two songs available is a mystery to me) but they did have the old Helen Reddy and Mike Watt stuff.
I liked how easy it was to use. However, I liked the sound quality in Winamp much better. And winamp connects to online radio stations much better, especially with dial up.
Both husband and I love MM. He’s a borderline fanatic about music, so he uses it more than I do, but we’ve never had a problem with it.
As for it being spyware? Not a chance. RealPlayer is more of a pain in the butt when it comes to popping up windows and overriding default settings, and WMP is just useless all the way around IMHO.
…From what I’ve seen and heard: MMJB is to Music as Windows is to Operating Sytems.
Biggest Asset: Flexible Tagging
Over the past couple of years, since I began the process of ripping tracks from my CDs to my hard drive, I’ve learned a few things and discovered how particular (to the point of being anal) I am about my mp3’s. For starters, I only have a 65 GB HDD and after it started filling up, I opted to rip on average 4-6 favorite tracks from each CD (There are of course many exceptions to that rule where ripping the entire album is a necessity). I use Music Match Jukebox (once again I’ll duck to avoid audiophile’s criticisms) to rip and tag my mp3 files and have absolutely no complaints about the software. I use the following tagging rules:
[ol][li]Artist: Artists with Proper Names go last name first the rest in parentheses. Example: Hendrix (Jimi Hendrix Experience)[/li][li]Track Title: As with all other text: always title case (even words like a, the, or, etc). I remove most punctuation marks (? : !) because Windows changes it to an underscore in the file name. If the track is live, it’s denoted with a (Live) at the end of the title.[/li][li]Album Title: For non-regular album releases I always insert either the word {Compilation} for ‘best-of “albums, {Anthology} for best of albums with more than one artist on the album (i.e. Neil Young’s “Decade” / “The Best of Dave Edmunds” et al), {Soundtrack}, {Tribute} or {Various} (for tiles like Time Life Rock-n-Roll Era 1956).[/li][li]Genre: More specific than CDDB selections, everything from Ambient Pop thru Zydeco.[/li][li]Preference: Ranked [1] (listen-able) thru [5] (essential).[/li][li]Tempo: I use this field for the “release year” for reasons below.[/li][li]Mood: The Satellite Radio channel I’d be most likely to hear the song played.[/li][li]Situation: The Local, NYC broadcast / college radio station I’d be most likely to hear the song played.[/li][li]Release Year: Self-explanatory[/li][li]Album Art: Tied to every track with IDV tags. I fthe art isn’t available on the net, I’ll scan it to my hard drive and tie it to the tracks manually.[/li][li]File Names: My PC’s “My Music” Folder has only 26 subfolders (Artists A thru Artists Z). Files names for songs not on Soundtrack, Tributes or Various Artist sets are named Artist – Track Title. For the 3 types listed above, their named Artist ¤ Track Title.[/ol] [/li]
My tagging peculiarities more than my double ripping times, but more than worth it when exporting the information into a database. I keep my mp3’s in both a MMJB Library and an iTunes Library (which has been exported to my 40Gb iPod. I also export the tracks to a text file and move it to Excel. MMJB’s library provides most the critical information (Track, Artist, Title, Genre, Year {duplicated in the Tempo field}, Mood (Satellite Channel} & Situation {Radio station}. I then extract most of the same info from the iTunes Library to get track lengths in seconds. I move the time field onto the first spreadsheet and then export the whole excel file to Access and Works. It sounds more complicated than it is. With a well-maintained and accurate database, burning custom mixes is easier than relying on my biological database.
MMJB Liabilities:[list=a][]No way (I know of) to flawlessly combine tracks in the ripping / burning process. (Examples: Tom Wait’s Intro/Emotional Weather Report, Mountain’s Sammy’s Tune/Nantucket Sleighride Beatles: Abbey Road Medley, Tons of Zappa, Pink Floyd and Moody Blues Tracks). The program I use as a work-around is Magix Audio Cleaning Lab 2004.[]Album Art. The IDV3 Tags / View By Album Art feature is quirky when you get over the 10,000 mp3 file mark[/list]
For a very brief period, MusicMatch was the best jukebox program out there for the PC. It had easier-to-use CD ripping than WinAMP, and a pretty good library.
Now, though, there’s no reason to use it. I hate it. I hated having to use it to use my iPod. Part of what convinced me to buy a Mac was that I hated using the iPod with my PC.
Now that iTunes is available for free for PC’s, there’s no reason to use anything else.
Too late for this to be of any use to you ( 
) but I use EphPod to manage my iPod on my PC. I use iTunes primarily for loading the encoded songs I buy from iTunes, but I still prefer EphPod for my day-to-day management of my iPod database. It’s either freeware or shareware. I should really find out soon & pay for it if it’s shareware, since I really like it.
I use iTunes on my Windows computer, after years of using it on Macs. I used to use WinAmp and MusicMatch on Windows, but I never really cared for either. Now iTunes gives me great music management, and access to the best Web store on both platforms. I highly recommend it.