There's one and ONLY ONE reason why, despite using Bodhi Linux as my main driver for more or less one year now, there's still a dual boot system booting Windows 7 on my computer.

Well, aside from the fact that Blender for me works better on the Windows partition (but that's another story), there's only one piece of software that makes me be still kind of chained to Windows, and that's Music bee.

Probably not many people knows it since desktop music players have fallen out of preference of many people, leaving them in second place to music streaming sites, and also Musicbee is not one of the most popular ones, but i have to say it's one of the most feature filled music players that i've found ever.

It's a free music player built with the purpose of managing a large collection of music. It has a lot of options for creating a music library, and also options for managing it, you know, tag management, artwork, lyrics, it has a great way of presenting your library, it has music reencode tools AND... i think it has CD burning capabilities (i haven't checked it for sure, but it may have, it super super complete).

What's the problem with it? Well, i love it, it's the software i use to manage my music, and for now no software that i know comes closer to it in amount of features, but the problem is: it is closed source, and it's Windows only.

It is really a bummer, because every time i have to manage stuff regarding my music collection i have to boot into Windows to work into it, and believe me, i have tried several other Linux software that does similar stuff, and it always lacks features that i need.

Let me explain a bit how do i manage my music: Aside from having albums stored in their own albums and stray songs stored in genre folders, lately when talking about the music i listen the most, i have all the music files that i like and listen frequently pooled on a single folder, then i created a bunch of playlists, each one of different genres or themes.

On Music Bee it's super easy to manage, i add new music to several of the created playlists and Music bee keeps track of it, if i delete the file phisically on one playlist it deletes the file on all the playlists where that file is, and it also prevents me from adding the same file twice to a playlist.

When i finish adding files to my playlists, i just drag them to a "virtual hard disk" that i created for this purpose and Music bee copies the playlist and the new tracks to it, if the source files aren't in mp3 it transcodes them first before copying them, so i don't have to deal with multiple file formats.

I've become so used to this way of working with my music that i think i would have problems trying to do the same with other software, or all the steps involved would make it too cumbersome. so far i've tried Guayadeque (no longer maintained sadly), Quod Libet, Clementine/Strawberry and several others, and for now almost all of them suck one way of another, particularly when trying to manage large playlists or copying them to other folders/devices.

Some people would say that i could try running Music Bee on WINE, but a lot of people have problems with this too. To this day, no one has made Music bee run successfully on WINE, not at least with a lot of bugs that make it unworkable.

I'll keep trying to find another music player that i can install on Linux that allows me work on my music collection the way i want, and, who knows, maybe i could try coding it myself if the challenge is not big enough!