Best Windows Phone 8 music and playlist manager

[RonV42]

I have 4 family members with some variant of Windows Phone 7. Having all our music on our home server with the files marked to read only protects the music from auto ID tag updates. Zune was great at keeping the like/dislike rating in it's local database vs. on the file level in id tags. This allowed each family member to create their "auto" playlists without effecting everyone else.

Well now my Wife has a Windows Phone 8 and none of the syncing software can create auto playlists without touching and updating the "star" rating which would effect everyone's auto play lists.

Is there a music management software that behaves like the Zune software? I have looked at MediaMonkey and MusicBee since these seem to be the two top management tools out there. But they assume that the music in your libraries are not shared and when you rate a song it updates the ID tags to reflect that rating. I want to keep the shared libraries on my server with the files locked down and have each family member rate them as before but I can't seem to find a decent solution that supports this capability.

Any thoughts?

 

[Napalm Frog]

I use MusicBee with the default settings (I prefer my tags updated), but there IS an option to store locally. Just need to uncheck the option. Many programs are like this (eg, Foobar2000 as my main music player)

 

[RonV42]

This is great...I didn't even see that setting....I'll give it a shot and see how it works....

 

[mjlenox]

May I ask what wp8 app allows you to play the music on your home server? Or, are you just syncing the physical files to the phone? Thanks.

 

[RonV42]

I am just using music bee to download music to the phone, Haven't found a player for WP8 that can play from a share but if you run MediaBrowser as a media server they have clients for Windows Phone, Windows 8.1 Modern app, Roku, etc. It seems to work well.

 

[mjlenox]

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, MediaBrowser doesn't allow the use of Auto/Smart Playlists. Amazing that all I need to do is access my media server via uPnP over the internet, and there's not one WP app out there that will do it.

 

[lamdfer]

I use KUWO

 

[mjlenox]

I don't see anything called kuwo in the app store. Could you be more specific?