Those who know me well also know that I have a thing for monkeys.  I collect stuffed monkeys, monkey stickers, toys etc.  I've been asking Santa for a trunk monkey for years, but that's just not panning out.  I've noticed a theme in some of my favorite apps, gizmos and gadgets here lately.  Yep!  Monkeys!  I figured I'd blog about a couple of my favorites.

  1.  Media Monkey

How do I love thee Media Monkey?  Let me count the ways!  I've been a die hard Winamp fan for years, until I discovered this gem.  I came across it during my sheer and utter frustration with managing music for my Zune.  I'd just given up and purchased my Ipod and quickly discovered how wonderful Media Monkey is when it comes to working with my collection and with my Ipod!  It's without a doubt one of my favorite apps.

MM has a full tag editor complete with online lookup and tag-fix.  This can be one on a one-by one basis or in a batch.  It also allows you to browse for and apply album art.  There are also many advanced attributes available for the advanced user!  This is invaluable to me, because I have discovered that I have a lot of media that I want to treat as a single "album" and have it organized as such on the Ipod. 

It's easy to create playlists.  You can make media monkey playlists, m3u files, or create AutoPlaylists based on search criteria.  That is pretty cool!  When I'm in the mood for jazz, I can do a search of all my library with "jazz" in the tags and generate a playlist.  Pretty neat!  For daily use, what I've done is create a MAIN playlist out of all 140 GB of music on my drive.  The initial process was a bit tedious due to tagging issues, but MM has a super easy drag-and-drop interface which made it easy to get everything organized.  This gives me a very good explorer-esque visualization of how a playlist is going to sync up in the Ipod.  I can also point it to my portable external drive, back up the library and use the same library on ALL of my machines (one just has to make sure to map the external as the same drive letter everywhere).

Syncing!  Did I mention it syncs my Ipod?  Call me a snob, but I hate I-Tunes.  It is kind of the same problem I had with my Zune's software.  I really want more control.  I want to use a more familiar and less-proprietary interface.  MM does a great job syncing the Ipod.  I especially love the "Sync Selected" feature that allows me to just sync up one folder/album/artist/track/whatever.  I can view my Ipod in an explorer type view and manage tracks from that interface as well.  It's really awesome!  Then there's the automatic format converter.  I can set MM to convert all FLAC to Mp3 (or other permutations of format conversion) upon syncing if I so chose.

The format converter can also be used on an album by album (folder by folder) basis or also when ripping CD's.  MM rips CDs into numerous formats and will burn to whatever format and quality selected.

Reports!!  MM will generate stats or other reports into exel or xml files for you.  I don't know WHY I find that so cool really, but I do :) 

You can also use scripting tools to integrate MM with other apps or other AutoPlaylists.

Oh yeah - It's a pretty cool player too!  It wasn't difficult to get used to using.  It's skinable and utilizes those cool visualizations too.  The auto-dj feature is awesome!

I really love Media Monkey - It's an app I use every single day.  No more separate apps for playing, ripping, converting, tagging and syncing!  The forum and community over there is very supportive and helpful, and they are constantly improving the tool!  I highly recommend MM to anybody who is serious about their music collection!  You can find more information about Media Monkey at http://mediamonkey.com/product.htm .

2.  MonkeyGTD

MonkeyGTD is an awesome GTD Tool!  (Getting Things Done, by David Allen)   This tools is pretty new to me, but I really love it so far!

When I was first getting familiar with the GTD methodology, a wise soul showed me how he was doing it via one huge MS Word document.  It was simple as well as easy to manage and change.  I thought it was a brilliant approach.  I was meanwhile still struggling with notecards, notebooks, papers and post-its. 

MonkeyGTD turns that word doc into a wiki!  I love the dashboard and the approach for managing tasks is very straight forward.  The UI is very clean and intuitive.  As I check this out, I find it amazingly fast to do things via this system versus my paper and pen system I've been using!  You can also use themes with MonkeyGTD which is useful if you want to incorporate it into another site.

The only downside I've seen so far is that I cannot use my blackberry to update MonkeyGTD like I can with Remember The Milk via Twitter.

You can go take a test run at the MonkeyGTD demo here:  http://monkeygtd.tiddlyspot.com/demo3.html .