mediascanner-service-2.0 uninterruptible process

I was first made aware that mediascanner was active when trying to unmount a mounted partition on my HP-Pavilion-Sleekbook-14 laptop running ubuntustudio 14.04. When I clicked the partition in File Manager to unmount it I got a notification box saying 'Volume is busy' and 'mediascanner-service-2.0' listed in the box. Been using this setup for several years without noticing it ever happening before.

What I really would like to know is, having located the mediascanner-service process in System Monitor, can I just stop, end or kill this process. It is rather annoying when it interferes with my normal operations on the computer. Is it an essential part of the running system?

Sorry if this is not a sensible question. I am not an expert on Linux, so the answer is not obvious to me.