We’ve seen a veritable deluge of metadata tools over the last few months. Almost all of them have their redeeming features and minor drawbacks. The best one are absolutely the programs that are both quick and easy as well as accurate, like the recently reviewed My Movie Finder. Today, however, we take a look at another solution that put’s a new spin on simplicity.

Media Center Master provides you with the opportunity to run in the background, automatically detecting new folders and searching for metadata. Imagine, getting automatic metadata retrieval for all your movies. It gets even better though, Media Center Master will even download cast and crew portraits, backdrops and posters that are compatible with Media Browser!

To get started download and install Media Center Master from the New Releases section of the MCM Community Forums. As a small note after installing, you will want to run the program as an administrator by right-clicking the shortcut and selecting (Run as Administrator) otherwise some of the options don’t work properly.

Once you’ve got the program installed and running you’ll want to set up a few basic options. Open up the options dialog by selecting Options –> Preferences from the menu. You’ll want to tell MCM where to find your movies by entering the folders in the Scan Folders section. Alternatively, you can also drag and drop movie folders onto the main dialog for manual entry.

If you’re using Media Browser (and you should be!), you will also want to set the location of your ImagesByName directory. If you haven’t changed anything in your Media Browser setup the default value should be correct though. One last thing, selecting “Minimize to Tray” is something to consider if you’ll be leaving MCM on full time to automatically pick up your new movies as they’re added.

Once you’ve got your directories all setup save the options and return to the main window. It may be necessary to reload the movie listing by right-clicking the far left area and selecting “Refresh this whole list”. Afterwards you should have a list of your movies with those that haven’t got proper metadata listed in yellow.

Now Media Center Master will begin retrieving metadata for each of your movies. By default it will also download posters, backdrops and actor portraits for use in plug-ins like Media Browser. Once completed you can also right-click any entry in the list to edit, delete or refresh metadata for each movie. Unfortunately, at this time, editing movie metadata is strictly through notepad so some users may shy away from this area.

From here just minimize Media Center Master and let it handle the rest! As you add new movies to your collection MCM will pick up the folder and search for new meta content. This hands off approach is certainly worth a try for those running dedicated Media Centers that don’t like having to take time out to run metadata retrieval programs by hand.