Media Monkey 3 is the most exciting audio player yet

I've always been a fan of MediaMonkey (http://www.MediaMonkey.com), but with it's recent version 3 release it's become the most exciting music player out there. MM has been just another one of a half-dozen or so leading players, but the scripts that its latest version is enabling make it top-of-the-heap.

The merits of music players is a frequent topic around here, and the tastes generally run to the utilitarian. This frequently means minimalist, but I wonder if that's because so much of the feature set in today's apps is eye candy and other junk that introduce complexity and bugs. The scripts that I'd like to tell you about really have use, so I hope they escape that criticism.

What to listen to?
My collection is large, so the biggest problem I've got is deciding what to listen to. There are external services to help you put together playlists (MusicIP is a good one), but I don't know of any that's well-integrated. Some folks have written MM scripts that I'd never have though of, but do a great job in building me a list of music to listen to.

Last.FM Node
This plugin builds a "best-of" list for an artist, or find tracks having a given tack, or research related artists, all based on actual Last.FM data. For each of these tasks it submits requests, then searches your own database looking for what you've got on that list.

The most basic operation is the "best-of" for an artist. Simply add a Favorite Artist, and it will get the top tracks for that artist from Last.FM:

But you can do other things with the artist. It's in a tree structure, so you can open up its node to see a list of related artists. In this picture I've opened Dream Theater, and within that, continued to drill down into Symphony X. For each of these artists, you can click on the node to see the "best of".

You can also get lists of top tracks having a given tag. Just add a Favorite Tag node, and click on it to retrieve your list. You can also drill into this to see top musicians having that tag, and repeat the process above to see their best songs.