Secret Tips For…

Music bee

Control Musicbee from an Android device

To control what Musicbee ( www. getmusicbee.com) is playing on your PC from your Android tablet or phone you need the Musicbee Remote plug-in from www.snipca.com/25419. Click the blue Download button then, once the page refreshes, click the green Download button on the right (ignore the one on the left, as it’s an advert). Close Musicbee if you currently have it open, then double-click the downloaded file to install the plugin.

Next, open Musicbee and a window with options for the plug-in will open along with the program’s main window. Click the ‘X’ at the top right to close the plug-in’s window. Next, download the Musicbee Remote app www.snipca. com/25423 to your Android tablet or phone (there isn’t an IOS version as yet). Once installed, open the app, click the three horizontal lines at the top left and you’ll be able to browse and play tracks from your library and playlists.

Automatically retrieve album details and artwork

Musicbee has a clever tagging tool that scans your albums, compares them to its online database and adds any missing details, including track names, genres and album artwork. To do this, click Albums at the top left (see screenshot right) and select album. Click an album in the list, click on any of its tracks in the pane on the left then press Ctrl+a on your keyboard to select them all. Right-click on the selected tracks, then click ‘Auto-tag by Album’. When the Album Auto-tagger pop-up box opens, select the album that seems the most relevant from the list at the top of the box. Any changes the Auto-tagger is about to make to the tracks will be highlighted in red. Once you’re happy with your selection (and the proposed changes), click Apply Tags.

Add Musicbee to Windows’ right-click menus

You can speed up the time it takes to add songs to Musicbee from File Explorer (or from desktop folders) by adding options to the right-click context menu. Open Musicbee, click the three horizontal lines (top left), then Edit Preferences. When the Preferences pop-up box opens, tick ‘enable Musicbee in Windows Explorer and context menus’. Next, tick the audio formats you use most often in the box below it (we ticked MP3 and FLAC, for example), then click Apply followed by Save. You will now see options to play or queue music in Musicbee when you right-click an audio file in your selected formats.

Customise Musicbee’s theme

To change Musicbee’s theme, click Musicbee (at the top of its window), View, then click Skins. Only a few choices are available by default, so to add more go to www.snipca.com/25420, click on any of the themes you like (Musicbee calls its themes ‘skins’) and click the blue Download button, followed by the green one (on the right). The theme will download as a ZIP file. To add it to Musicbee, extract the theme (it will have the extension XMLC) to the

C:\program Files (x86)\musicbee\skins

folder. If you have Musicbee open, close then reopen it. Select the new skin by clicking View, then Skin as described above.