GOM Audio is from the makers of GOM Video, a Windows media player that seems to have more clout over in Korea than in the West. Personally, the only reason I know GOM Video exists is because it has ties to competitive Starcraft 2 video streaming – or something like that – and GOM Video always felt clunky to me. But GOM Audio? Boy, they’ve done something right because this is a music player that could really catch on.

GOM Music Player Interface

After installing GOM Audio, this is the welcoming interface that you’ll see: the main player on the left and an introductory panel on the right. If you’re still wondering what GOM Audio does exactly, it tells you right there: a lightweight audio player designed to make it easy to listen to music on your computer. I can dig it.

A cursory glance at the GOM Audio welcome screen evokes in me one feeling: this audio player is clean. The interface design is minimal in the sense that it doesn’t use flashy gradients or rounded edges. Everything is a straight line, all of the colors are evenly toned, and the contrast is pleasant on the eyes.

This is an interface that has been designed well because I find myself wanting to look at it. Sure, the layout may be reminiscent of something like Winamp, but GOM Audio has captured an element that takes it to the next level.

Controls

Speaking of layouts, GOM Audio’s way of positioning interface elements is easy and intuitive. Things that immediately stick out to me: icons are extremely good at conveying their meaning, consistent interface design, and clear demarcation between sections. All of these things make for enjoyable music listening.

GOM Audio has a few tiny details that may not seem like big deals, but really improve on convenience. First, the playlist switching buttons – simple but effective. Second, the total playlist time length displayed at the bottom. Third, a mode changer for the top player portion so you can customize the way it looks.

As you might have guessed by now, GOM Audio is not a music library. It’s a music player. If you’re looking for something like iTunes, then you’ll need to look elsewhere. GOM Audio is more of a playlist manager.

Skinning

GOM Audio comes with three prepackaged skins: the brown-and-orange skin in the prior screenshots, this rounded white skin above, and a third compact skin that gets rid of everything but the actual player buttons. It’s not the greatest variety, but I really love the default one, so I don’t have much room to complain.

Though you can add new GOM Audio skins, and even though the skinning system is powerful, the problem is finding them. It’s not the most popular music player and it doesn’t have a central community, so skins are sprawled across the Internet in hard to reach places. The best I’ve found were in random blog posts and DeviantArt accounts.

Other Features

I’m not sure how many people still use software-based Internet streams, especially with the popularity of services like Pandora and Songza, but GOM Audio has a list of streaming radios in case your own playlists have grown stale or you want to discover some new music. Feel free to add your own Internet radio URLs if you have a few that aren’t included in the default list.

Other features of the GOM music player that you may like:

• Supports MP3, M4A, OGG, WMA, WAV, MID, FLAC formats and more.
• Alter audio playback speed from 0.1x to 2.0x.
• Apply audio effects like reverb and surround to live playback.
• Plugin system for feature extensibility.
• Timer for automatically shutting down, restarting, or sleeping your computer.

Verdict

As I near the end of this review, I’m struck by one truth: GOM Audio isn’t very distinctive from any other music player, but it just feels good. If you were to ask me why I like GOM Audio, I couldn’t give you any technical reasons – it doesn’t have any standout features – because I just like it. It melds into the background and never interferes. It plays your music for you and lets you do your own thing without being a distraction.

So if you’ve been like me, on the prowl for a clean music player that feels both fast and complete, then you should really give GOM Audio a try. It definitely gives other lightweight music players (e.g., Foobar2000, AIMP3, etc.) a run for their money.

The post Tired Of Big & Bloated Music Players? Try GOM Audio For Free! appeared first on MakeUseOf.

But here’s the thing – I’ve already been through all of the big name household programs. Winamp? It has a place in my heart because it was my first music player ever, but it’s not perfect.  Foobar2000? Though it’s been my main player for years, I’m still looking for something else. AIMP3? MusicBee? MediaMonkey? All worth a try but none have hit the jackpot yet.

So for the past few days, Spider Player has been on my plate. The screenshots drew me in at first glance, the feature set sounded useful, and the fact that it’s completely free sold me. Does it live up to my ridiculously high standards? Read on to find out.

If I had to describe Spider Player’s interface in one word, it’d be muted. By that, I mean it’s not particularly flashy or catchy but it’s not so empty as to be boring or bland. The layout is interesting and the colors are there yet it all happens in a way that isn’t exciting or distracting. It’s muted, which is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. That’s just how it is.

The layout itself is most similar to that of Winamp: multiple individual windows that snap together to form a whole. The individual parts can be detached or closed at will, which allows for a bit of customization. If you don’t need the equalizer, for example, then why have it? Just close it and you’ve slimmed it down.

As for the playlist display, it’s rather primitive. Most music players nowadays have a library feature that automatically organizes your songs by artist, album, genre, etc. Spider Player doesn’t have any of that. It’s similar to vanilla Foobar2000 because you only have playlists, except Spider Player’s playlists have fewer features. If that’s what you prefer, then great! But I imagine that for most of us, myself included, it’s just not good enough.

I should probably mention that Spider Player is pretty old. The last update was pushed out in late 2010, which is an eternity in Internet time. However, despite the fact that this program is nearing three years of idleness, the feature set is comparable to a lot of modern players and it’s kept up with the times somewhat well.

That’s likely because Spider Player used to be a premium program that retailed for almost $20 USD. Just as it went out of development, though, the creators decided to release all of the features for free. Using the following license key, you can instantly unlock all Pro features:

27U3Z909I95-KK147A893S4K6Y1M0F-780363812

Once you’ve unlocked the Pro version of Spider Player, you’ll gain unimpeded access to all of the features in the program.

• 32-bit sound processing. Most sound processing is done on the sound card, but even if your sound card is outdated Spider Player will process audio internally at 32-bit precision, resulting in improved audio quality.
• Audio streaming. Whether it’s from Internet radio or just an audio file located on a remote server somewhere, Spider Player can stream it perfectly to you.
• Internet radio recording. As you listen to Internet radio (which you can with Spider Player), you can record the audio directly to a file in MP3 and AAC formats.
• Lots of supported formats. You won’t need to install any additional codecs to play nearly any audio format in existence: MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, M4A, AAC, AAC+, AC3, MPC, MP+, MPP, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, Ogg FLAC, TTA, APE, WavPack, Speex, WAV, CDDA, WMA, MID, RMI, KAR, S3M, XM, MOD, IT, MO3, MTM, UMX.
• Easy format conversion. With Spider Player, you can flawlessly convert nearly any audio file into one of the following formats: MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC, or WavPack. If Spider Player can play it, then it can convert it.
• Portable version. Portable programs can come in handy and Spider Player can be used without needing to install it. Place it on your USB drive, SD card, CD, or wherever else and you can still run it without any hiccups.
• Last.fm integration. Scrobble your songs and notify Last.fm of your currently playing tracks.
• Lyrics download. Spider Player can automatically download lyrics for your songs and display them right next to the playlist, making it easy to sing along with your favorite tunes.

Music players comprise a software category where personal preference trumps nearly every other benchmark. The best music players might be missing one feature that makes it unusable for you. On the other hand, even mediocre programs can have a fan base. It’s really up to the person using it.

So what’s my final verdict? Spider Player is worth a try. There’s nothing that truly distinguishes Spider Player as a leader of its class, but it does enough things right to make it worthy of a mention. Give it a shot and see if you like it. As for me, I’ll still be on the hunt for the mythical perfect music player.

The post Need An Alternative to Winamp? Try Spider Player [Windows] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Recently, I heard about a lesser known Android app called Rocket Player. I checked the Rocket Player Android app out, the screenshots looked enticing, so I downloaded it and gave it a test run. The results were pleasantly surprising, but is it a contender for the title of Best Android Music Player?

Interfaces are the most important aspect of any app, in my opinion. You’d think that in our sophisticated world of the 21st Century, the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover” would be instilled deeply into our hearts, right? Too bad that’s not the case. The interface is the first impression, and first impressions can often be a make-it-or-break-it deal.

Rocket Player’s Android interface is top notch, and by that I don’t mean flashy or innovative. If you’ve read my reviews before, you probably know how much of a stickler I am for clean, minimal, and efficient designs. Well, Rocket Player manages to do all of that while maintaining a polished feel.

The app comes with a default of two themes that you can choose from: a Black theme that looks like pretty much every black theme in every app ever made, and a Chrome theme that has a brushed metal appearance reminiscent of older versions of Mac OS. They’re both easy on the eyes.

As for the actual layout, it’s about as vanilla as they come. You’ve got artist listings, album listings, song listings – you know, the usual fare. The plus side to Rocket Player, though, is that everything is smooth and fast. My 2-year-old Galaxy S often has trouble with frame skips and lag, but not here. That earns Rocket Player a lot of points from me.

Music players are at their best when they let you listen to music without getting in the way. I’ve fiddled with far too many apps that try to be innovative and slick in their presentation, utilizing drawers and tabs and swipes in order to do this and that. Rocket Player keeps it all slimmed down: you only see what you need to see, everything else is pushed aside.

I’ve been using this app for many weeks now and I’m impressed. It may appear to be a boring music player that doesn’t have much panache, but that’s great: The interface is easy to learn so you spend less time looking for the right song and more time listening to it.

Up in the corner, you can pull out a Now Playing list of the next songs in queue. Rearranging the queue is fast, deleting songs off of it is even faster, and adding songs requires no more than a long-press on a song in your library.

There are two features in Rocket Player for Android that I haven’t seen elsewhere: free equalizer, and a tag editor. Every music player has an audio equalizer, but Rocket Player is the first one I’ve seen that lets you change it up without requiring the premium version. Of course, the free version is limited in that you can’t save or load presets, but that’s fine by me.

The tag editor is a nice touch, too, so you can fix pesky errors without loading up another app or tool. And along the same lines of convenience, Rocket Player lets you take any song in the library and set it as your ringtone instantly.

Other features you might enjoy:

• Video browser and player.
• Sleep timer that automatically shuts off after a specified time period.
• Lock screen buttons for ease of control.
• Home screen widgets for ease of control.
• Integrates seamlessly with iSyncr to synchronize your music to your Android.

For $3.99 USD, you can upgrade to the Premium version of Rocket Player. Access to equalizer presets is not the only thing that comes with it:

• Album art downloads.
• Replay gain to normalize song volumes.
• Gapless playback and crossfading.
• More audio formats: ALAC, FLAC, WAV, WMA, and more.

My final verdict? I highly recommend Rocket Player for Android users. That doesn’t mean that I think you’ll love it as much as I do; it means that I think it’s worth a try if you still haven’t found the best music player that satisfies your needs. If you’re looking for something clean and sleek with more focus on functionality than graphics, Rocket Player may be for you.

The post Take A Break From The Mainstream Music Apps And Try Rocket Player [Android] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

See the problem? It’s scattered throughout the web, so when you want to listen to that one song that you can’t remember the name of, but saved it somewhere online… it could take a while, and that’s if you saved it. Songdrop, which we covered previously in the MakeUseOf Directory, is your solution to this problem.

So how do you find it? Well, what you do now is you go to Google, search some halfway correct lyrics and hope to find that song you remember listening to. What you could be doing, however, is if you like a song, quickly “dropit” (don’t worry, I didn’t misspell it, you’ll catch on to it in a bit) into Songdrop and be on your way. Next time you want to listen to that song, just go to Songdrop and it’ll be right where you left it!

What Is Songdrop?

Well, if you haven’t “gathered” already, Songdrop is a place to save the music you discover and listen to on the web for later streaming. Think of it as your digital record collection – a place to go to find that one song you were thinking of all day. Or perhaps a place to listen to your very own custom mix of tunes from all over the Internet. But there’s a lot more to Songdrop than just that. It’s also a place to discover new music and follow other people, whether they be artists or your friends (or if you’re lucky, both!)

Try It Before You Sign Up

I love it when services and apps do this. Why? Because I like to know exactly what I’m signing up for, and what better way to know than to use it as is? So before you signup, take a look at the Recent Drops or Popular Drops pages to get a feel for the interface and features.

Of course, this isn’t the intended use for Songdrop, as the biggest benefits come whenever you create an account, but these pages are available to anyone and give a you a good idea of what Songdrop does. Do you like these pages? Don’t worry – there are direct links to them once you create an account too.

Signing Up For Songdrop

The signup is pretty simple. There aren’t any beta invites or a field to enter your email address in so you can wait “in line” until the service opens up to more users in a couple months. Songdrop is ready to go and be used now.

Like many services, Songdrop offers you the option to sign in through Facebook or to just create an account the old-fashioned way with your email address, user name and password. I, personally, like signing up through Facebook, especially for services like this because there are often benefits that come with it. I’ll touch upon that in a bit. If you do decide to signup through Facebook, remember to pay attention to the permissions (as you should with any service, website or app). You don’t have to allow it to post to your wall or let your friends see the posts it creates, although I’m not too worried about that with Songdrop.

If you opted to sign up through Facebook, you’ll need to choose a user name to complete the signup process. Once that is done (or for those who signed up directly on Songdrop) you’ll then get an email verifying your account. Follow the instructions in the email and you’re ready to rock!

Features In Songdrop

Songdrop is really pretty basic, but there are a few key features you should know about, many of which you probably will discover simply by trying it out on the Recent Drops and Popular Drops pages.

The Dropit Button

This is the primary feature of Songdrop – obviously, you need a tool to drop the music with. It comes in two forms: a bookmarklet and a Chrome extension. Once you signup, you’ll be prompted to add this, so don’t worry about finding it. Depending on the browser you use, you’ll be give then choice of either or. I’m a Chrome user so this is what I saw upon visiting the page:

If you’re a Firefox, Safari, Opera or a user of some other browser, you’ll have to use the bookmarklet.

What if you’re a Chrome user who wants the use the bookmarklet and not the extension? Well, it wasn’t the simplest workaround, but what I did was opened up Firefox, went to the Dropit button page, dragged the bookmarklet button to my bookmarks bar and synced it with Xmarks.

Alternatively (if you don’t have Xmarks, you should), you can copy the bookmarklet code, go back to Chrome, right-click on your bookmarks bar to create a new bookmark and paste the code into the Link field. Don’t forget to name it “Dropit” too.

NOTE: For accessing this page in the future, it’s located under the Help tab. Also, the method mentioned above can be done with any bookmarklet.

Feeds

There are currently four feeds that you can listen to in Songdrop. We’ve already mentioned two of them: Recent Drops and Popular Drops. The other two feeds, currently, are Friends Drops and Artists Drops.

Friends Drops will be seldom used, as of now, since Songdrop is still in its beginning stages. But as it grows in popularity (and it will), this will become a pretty interesting feature. Right now, we’re bombarded with what our friends are listening to on Facebook and Spotify. It can kind of get annoying whenever it’s right there. But here, it’s neatly tucked away, but still easy to access when we are interested.

As far as the Artists Drops feed goes, this is a gem. Remember whenever I said that I’d get to the benefit of connecting Songdrop to Facebook? This is it – Songdrop will scan your Facebook account for all the artists you like, so you don’t have to add them manually.

Your Profile, Also Known As “My Player”

No not my player, yours. No it’s not “Your Player,” it’s “My Player.” Oh whatever. The My Player tab features everything in Songdrop that belongs to you: your mixes, your drops, your followers, and who you’re following.

Please excuse the sparseness of my profile. Despite my recent infatuation with it, I still have just begun to use it to build my own collection.

Search

The search function is rather simple and features three columns: Songs, Artists and People. The People column contains the results from the people you are following. If you aren’t following anyone, this column will be blank. Sometimes even the Song column will be blank if that artist’s music has yet to be added to Songdrop.

The Interface

The interface of an app isn’t usually considered a “feature,” but in this case I think it deserves some recognition. For such a small service, that’s just beginning, I am more than impressed with how well it conforms to the browser, even if it’s docked to one side like Windows 7 and 8 do.

In addition, it’s just really simple and easy to use. I think you’ll be impressed immediately after visiting the website… so just wait until you start using the service.

Included in the interface are the music controls, with an added bonus of video.

Check Out Your Settings

Like any service or app that you start using, it’s always best to take a look at the settings. Here in Songdrop you can change your account information (i.e. Name, username, email, location, password), profile picture, email notifications and social account connections (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm).

Have A Question? Check Out The FAQ

Unlike most services out there, the FAQ page on Songdrop, appropriately located under the Help tab, is both helpful and entertaining – rare, right? I thought so. If you have a question, definitely check out the FAQ page first. In addition the help, there is also just some really interesting information about Songdrop.

However, if you still need help, they offer support through Twitter, Facebook and email. But be patient with them, as they state on their About and FAQ pages, they’re still starting out and a pretty small team.

We’re in the very, very early stages of development, so there will be some bugs. If you see anything that looks weird or you just want to tell us something, feel free to email or tweet at us.

Is Songdrop Completely Flawless?

No – just like any service, especially one that’s just starting, it has it’s quirks. One that I’ve found is that it doesn’t detect everything. For instance, when trying it out on one of our Sound Sunday columns, which features music embedded in the post, it only detected the YouTube videos.

A quote from their FAQ page:

However, I did discover a workaround. If you clicked on the link to the song (in this instance it took you to the official Bandcamp website), and then clicked the Dropit button, it worked (as expected). Is this slightly more of a hassle? Yes… slightly. But you have to remember your alternative in acquiring music before Songdrop came into your life – I’m telling you, your life will never be the same. And think of this as a positive – by clicking the link to the song, you’re now introduced to the rest of the artist’s songs as well, which you can also drop into Songdrop.

In addition it still doesn’t work with a lot of the major music websites and services out there like Grooveshark, Pandora, Deezer and Spotify.

Conclusion

Songdrop is an incredible service already, just starting out, and has a ton of potential and room to grow. And not only that, but the people behind it are envisioning it to fill the void in our music listening habits as well. This is an exciting company to be following right now.

Are you already using Songdrop? What do you think of it? If not, jump on over to their site, try it out, and then come back here and leave a comment with your thoughts. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think!

The post Songdrop: Your Free & Favorite Song-Saving Service You Didn’t Even Know About Until Now appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Pandora manages to accomplish this using the Music Genome Project, which analyzes music with the help of actual musicians to form a database that can compare and contrast music at a fundamental level. All this to say, if you type in a song or artist, Pandora will constantly stream songs that are similar to it.

Over time, however, Pandora’s flaws do start to become noticeable. While we have an article on cool things you can do with Pandora, this post will focus on external tools that make Pandora more accessible and more convenient for the average user.

Elpis

Elpis is my most favorite Pandora-related application. In Greek mythology, Pandora opened her box and released evil unto the world, but one thing remained in that box: the Greek god of hope, Elpis. Having used this program for a few months now, I can confidently say that Elpis has restored my hope in Pandora.

In short, Elpis is a standalone desktop program that connects to your Pandora account and streams your stations. With it, you can add new stations, delete old ones, control it using remote media keys (if you have them), thumbs up and thumbs down, and more. Super bonus: it’s entirely free and open source.

It always irked me that I had to have my browser open to listen to Pandora, mostly because of the wasted screen/tab estate. It’s a small complaint, sure, but Elpis is just so convenient that it might be the best Pandora-related program out there. Period.

PRadio

PRadio (which I assume is a squishing together of Pandora Radio) is a Windows 8 app that integrates the goodness of Pandora straight into the new operating system. With it, you can play songs and view stations using Windows 8’s Modern UI. The integration is actually pretty handy since you can pin certain stations for direct access.

Some people believe that Windows 8 is still missing a few necessary features and others are saying that Windows 8 didn’t live up to its expectations, but I know a lot of people who have already made the switch. If you’re one of those people and you love listening to Pandora, then PRadio might be the app that improves your quality of listen – even if by just a little bit.

Anesidora

Maybe you don’t mind listening to Pandora in a browser (maybe your browser is open 24/7 already), but there are some quirks of the web-based interface that you don’t like. If you use Chrome, there’s an answer for you: Anesidora. It’s a Chrome extension that allows you to play Pandora without dedicating a tab.

Anesidora is a simple browser dropdown that comes complete with play controls. It uses fewer system resources than Flash or HTML5, so it’s preferable on slower machines (e.g., netbooks). It’s not an official Chrome extension, possibly due to copyright concerns and other issues, so you’ll need to download and install Anesidora off the official site.

For a more complete review, check out Aaron’s Anesidora overview.

FindThatBand

FindThatBand is a browser extension available on Chrome and Firefox. It’s not exactly specific to Pandora, but it’s definitely useful in connection with Pandora. Basically, whenever you come across a song or artist while browsing the web, you can highlight the term, right click, and use FindThatBand to learn more.

So, for example, if you came across Britney Spears on the web and you highlighted her name, you could right click and select “Find on Pandora” to immediately start a new station for Britney Spears. This is really useful if you come across a song or artist and you want more music that’s similar to that one.

Conclusion

Pandora is a great service that played its part in pioneering online radio for the masses. It may not be as pick-and-choose as other services that are now available, but I like it for what it is. If you like Pandora but you’re looking for something that will add a dash of spice, try one of the tools listed above. They all make Pandora just a little more convenient for everyday use.

The post Enhance Pandora’s Music Magic With These Great Tools appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Winamp remains a beast of a media player with an extensive, yet fully customizable interface. Since its beginnings, it depended on plugins for many of its features. Winamp is a cross-platform application available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. This review will focus on the Windows version fo the Winamp media player, without any but default plugins.

Winamp Media Player Setup

The first small disappointment came while installing Winamp. While it’s not sneaky about it, the setup procedure does offer to install a third party game along with Winamp. You have to check I don’t agree to opt out. Fortunately, no option is selected by default, so you cannot accidentally proceed with the ‘wrong’ choice.

When the installation is completed, you are taken through a four step setup process. Apparently, the most important and thus first step is to select a skin. This is followed by picking file associations, online services, and finally providing contact data for collection of feedback and usage statistics. All these steps are optional and you can finish the setup at any time.

The First Launch

Winamp launches in a huge multi-pane window playing its famous Llama jingle. If you have never used Winamp, this screen might be a bit overwhelming. But at least it’s comprehensive and clearly organized.

Here is a quick walk-through. The element in the top left is the actual player. It contains basic media fiile information, as well as playback and volume controls. To its right is a summary of the current file. On the far right you’ll find the playlist.

The lower 3/4 of the player contains a tabbed window. In the Media Library view you see the Library on the far left and information for any added files on its right. The other tabs contain the video (if available), audio visualization, and Winamp’s internal browser, which offers additional artist and album information via AOL Search.

Adding Files

To gain a better understanding of what each pane in the Media Library view does, drag&drop some audio and video files into Winamp and it will automatically organize them. Alternatively, you can go through the File menu in the top right and select Add Media to Library… This will open a small Explorer window. You can also add files by clicking the + button in the bottom left of the playlist.

Unfortunately, Winamp does not come with a large selection of internal video codecs, so be sure you have the necessary codecs installed to play your video files. Winamp does, however, support most audio files, including MP3, MIDI, MOD, MPEG-1, AAC, M4A, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, and WMA. In fact, it was one of the first players to support the Ogg Vorbis format by default.

Cool Feature Overview

Once the Media Library has been fed with some files, you will quickly figure out what all the different windows and panes are good for. In case you didn’t see them all, here are some cool features you shouldn’t miss.

In the Media Library tab, view your audio or video files, and click on an artist name. This will load additional artist information in a small horizontal pane at the very bottom. Click on the little i button or on the More Info link to open the AOL Music artist page within Winamp.

In the top right player pane, when you right-click the scrolling song title, you get a menu that will let you view similar tracks, jump to another file (via a search), to a specific time within the playing file, or send the file to various locations including a new playlist, CD burner, or bookmarks. A similar menu opens when you right-click files in the playlist.

Winamp’s look can be fully customized. For example you can change the content that the area between the player and the playlist shows. Click the small button in its lower right and choose what you want to see.

If you would like to see a more compact view of Winamp, you can hide the playlist through the View menu or by clicking [ALT] + [E]. Moreover, you can collapse the lower 3/4 window by clicking the button in the bottom right.

Furthermore, many of the menus, buttons, and pieces of information can be hidden to create a leaner interface. Explore the Options and View menus for all possibilities. For the ultimate lean an unobtrusive interface, Windows 7 users can hide the Main Window and operate Winamp exclusively via the taskbar. Hover your mouse over the Winamp icon in the taskbar and a thumbnail with player controls should show.

If this works, you can safely right-click into an empty space in Winamp and uncheck the Main Window or click [ALT] + [W]. To bring the Main Window back, right-click the thumbnail, click Winamp and select the respective item.

One of Winamp’s key features is ripping CDs or DVDs and encoding files. Insert an optical disc and switch to the respective drive in the Media Library. Winamp will automatically search for artist and album information. When it’s done, click the Rip button and select CD ripping preferences… to choose encoder, ripping speed, output file settings, and playlist creating settings. Available formats are MPEG-4 AAC, FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, SHOUTcast MPEG-2 ADTS-AAC, WAV, and WMA.

Finally, the Winamp media player offers great mobile apps that tie into the desktop application presented here via Devices in the Media Library. We have written all about the Android app here.

Another aspect I am not covering in this review is that of Winamp’s online services, which essentially are extensions to the media player.

Verdict

Winamp is a strong audio player with a focus on pulling in album and additional artist information. It works decently as a video player, but lacks advanced features, such as loading subtitles. The various menus are extensive and promise lots of features, unfortunately most are concerned with changing the player’s visual appearance. In its default view Winamp is huge and clunky, but the interface can be stripped down significantly to create a simplistic or highly personalized interface. Winamp is a solid media player and it might be the perfect choice if you need your desktop media player to manage files on your Android devices.

If you like the Winamp media player, but would prefer a lighter version, try Winamp Lite.

The post Winamp – A Solid Media Player that Excels in Managing Your Music Collection [Windows] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

I’ve preached on my loyalty to Winamp Lite in a previous article. It’s old and many would consider it to even be deprecated, but it’s always done the job for me. When I’m listening to music downloaded to a local drive, I don’t need Spotify or iTunes in charge of my music. However, for the past week, I’ve slowly started to fall in love with a new, free, and portable alternative to Winamp Lite that seems to incorporate the same elements of simplicity while also offering some really awesome extra functionality. Let me tell you about Hokrain!

Download Hokrain

First worth mentioning is the website that Hokrain calls home. Though I’ll echo and help explain much of it in this article, Hokrain’s website is one of the best examples of a one-pager that I’ve ever seen. All of the information that you’d be interested in, including a direct link to download the application, exists on a single page.

It saves you from wasting time and makes you want to download and give it a try. It’s one click away and you know everything that it has to offer, so why not?

Hokrain is completely portable and can be run from a flash drive. Hokrain runs perfectly on any version of Windows, from 98 onward. It’ll cost your disk 600 KB of space and I’ve yet to see it go over about 7 MB in RAM usage. Compared to one of the applications I mentioned earlier, Spotify or iTunes, the difference in resource intensity is extremely significant.

Out of the box, Hokrain’s interface is very simple and clean.

One quick glance and you’re able to see practically everything you need to begin listening to your music. Hokrain supports the following formats:

• MP3
• MP2
• MP1
• MPA
• OGG
• WAV
• AIFF
• MO3
• IT
• XM
• S3M
• MTM
• MOD
• UMX
• AAC
• AC3
• APE
• MAC
• CDA
• FLAC
• MIDI
• MID
• RMI
• KAR
• MPC
• MP+
• MPP
• TTA
• WMA
• WV

Navigate to a folder, double-click a track, and it will immediately begin playing.

Let’s break down a few of the more interesting parts of the audio player’s interface:

• Hokrain has a nice CPU usage monitor that shows just how much processing power it is consuming while playing. It’s near the top-right of the interface, and just 0.42% in the above screenshot.
• Hokrain’s volume slider is very large, running all the way up the right side of the interface. Unlike many audio players, it’s vertical rather than horizontal. Being so large, it really allows you to easily set an exact volume percentage, if you’re into round numbers like me.
• There is also a quality spectrum that lets you visualize the current track’s visual quality.
• Below the spectrum, you’re able to graphically seek your track. Some audio players have a simple slider that lets you seek through the track, but a graphical seeker really lets you pinpoint a particular part of a song at just a glance. No more hearing around and wasting time to get to the part of a song that you want.

The application’s settings are filled with goodies. Hokrain comes stocked with six different themes that you can choose from. Here is the Windows XP theme:

The General tab offers a lot of information and lets you set more than just your theme. There is an OSD (on-screen display) every time you change tracks to notify you of what is currently being played. It can be turned on or off. You are then able to toy with shell integration options, your tray icon, and a few other small tweaks.

Another great thing about Hokrain lies within the two Hot Keys tabs.

If you’re using a media player, you need to use hotkeys. It’s just that simple. Hokrain supports a ridiculous amount of hotkeys that let you control playing, stopping, pausing, muting, seeking, and plenty more. I’d argue that there are possibly even too many hotkeys!

The coolest part of the settings is something that I’d consider to be a “quality of life” feature, one that isn’t exactly necessary but it’s really nice to have: Scrobbler.

If you’re not big on Last.fm, Hokrain lets you keep local records on what tracks you play, how long you’ve listened to them, and how many times you’ve played them. You can sort these records to make out what your favorite songs are. It’s just an example of Hokrain thinking outside the box and doing more than the average audio player.

Hokrain is an audio player that I’m happy I’ve found. Even if you’re pleased with your current audio player, it’s a piece of software really worth appreciating. Give it a try and see if you like it. Let me know what you think in the comments!

The post Hokrain Is The Coolest Audio Player That You’ve Never Heard Of [Windows] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Much to my surprise (and disgust, having been a long naysayer of the iTunes way) my brand new – and recently restored using my own Mac – iPhone 5 wouldn’t sync without erasing everything first. I Googled for help like a consumer scorned, assuming I’d missed something obvious and there was a quick fix. Once it was all over I was left feeling like a fool.

Leave Me Alone, iTunes

I won’t divulge the words that spilled out of my mouth as I tried to sync my sparsely populated iTunes library (literally about 3 songs I’d imported specifically for this task) with my brand new iPhone 5. The iPhone that I’d restored from a backup using this very Mac, and a device that had a total of 0 songs onboard. Despite the hoo-ha generated by Apple’s decision to go “iTunes-less” with iOS 5, iTunes is still required for a great number of tasks.

Transferring media is one of the few of the shackles that continue to tether your iDevice to a PC or Mac at this late stage in the game. You can now download media files and “Open with…” on your device, but if you want to put that file into your library then you’re out of luck.

I do have a theory as to how my own situation arose, and how it has persisted this long. When I received my first iPhone 4 running iOS 4, iCloud-less and still reliant on iTunes for software updates I was faced with the task of updating to iOS 5 when the update landed. At the time I used my old Windows machine, updated, paired and forgot about it. A few months later this laptop died, and with no backup of my never-used iTunes library I gave up on what I then considered to be the world’s most bloated music player (iTunes for Windows).

Earlier this year I decided I would start again, repair my broken iOS Camera Roll and specifically not pair the device with any computer until I got the new MacBook I had been waiting for. I restored from iCloud, it didn’t quite go to plan, but things eventually worked out by choosing a different backup. The process took hours and hours to complete on a perfectly acceptable ADSL2+ connection of around 10Mbps. Once complete I checked the Settings > General > iTunes Wi-Fi Sync option in the iPhone’s preferences, and sure enough it told me to connect my phone to a PC to pair with iTunes and enable Wi-Fi syncing. I had a blank canvas, or so I thought, and so it stayed. It wasn’t until I got my iPhone 5 with plenty of storage space that I decided it was time to transfer some media, specifically for use with one app because I use Spotify for music listening on the go.

Not wanting to wait all night long to restore my iPhone from an iCloud backup, I backed up my iPhone 4 locally (I had still not connected to a PC, it was still displaying the “Connect to pair” message). Backup worked just fine, as it does with any iPhone you connect regardless of whether it’s paired to your machine or not. I then connected the new iPhone 5, set it up using iTunes and restored my backup. Everything looked good, until I went to sync music only a few hours ago and was given this:

From what I can gather, iCloud and iTunes have remembered my old iTunes library from my previous experiences with Windows. This is despite factory resetting the iPhone 4, getting it to a “blank” state and setting up then restoring my iPhone 5 using this Mac and this iTunes library. I probably don’t need to tell you this, but that’s beyond infuriating. I was left wondering how is anyone ever meant to remove that old library while retaining personal settings using backup methods?

Fixing The Mess

The irritating thing at this point was that clicking Sync in iTunes actually works fine at this stage. It’s only when “sync apps” or “sync music” was checked that the program threw a wobbly, which is beyond infuriating.

Here’s a list of things I tried that I found with help from my old friend Google:

• De-authorizing and re-authorizing all computers from within iTunes (no, I don’t know what I expected either).
• Choosing “Manually Manage Music And Videos” and clicking Apply (gave me the same error as above).
• Various fiddling with preferences, looking around for a “forget Library” button or equivalent that would let me retain my apps, Photos and other data while iTunes sorted itself out.
• Swearing.

Nothing seemed to work, so here’s what I did:

1. Transfer Purchases & Backup The Phone

I’m not sure where I got the idea for this, but I decided I’d let iTunes do what it wanted to my phone in order to transfer those few songs I wanted in the first place. My current iPhone library is a barren wasteland with no music in it, so if it deletes my library then what do I care? If it deletes everything on the phone I have a backup, and potentially the exact same issues once restored.

2. Attempt To sync Music With iTunes

This is the part that was giving me the nasty error in the first place. Absorb those words fully – “erase this iPhone” and “replaces the contents of this iPhone”. What does that mean to you?

3. Click Erase and Sync

Something I’d never do had I not backed up the phone, screenshotted my home screen (in case I forgot which apps I was currently enjoying) and checked my iPhoto library to ensure all my pictures were safe.

4. Wait For About 15 seconds.

What… it’s done?

Lose No Data

So in about 15 seconds the operation that promised to “erase this iPhone” and replace the contents of the phone with my blank iTunes library was finished. Did I lose data? Nope. Was I overjoyed? Of course. Did I feel like an idiot? Absolutely. Was it really my fault? Well…

Faced with a dialogue box that warns of the complete removal of data from your most-relied upon device in order to sync music, quite possibly the reason you’d opt for the device in the first place, I’m confident I’m not the only person who would approach with caution. From my understanding of what iTunes was telling me, I stood to lose everything and “start again”. Couple this with a backup made while the problem was prevalent, I had little faith in a solution that didn’t involve a lot of hoops and many, many jumps. In short, I took a chance (or so it felt) and the solution was painfully simple and fuss-free.

So yes, it was my fault. But then again, I don’t feel alone in my idiocy because there are people responding to threads created in 2010 from as recently as this month (November 2012) who are unwilling to click that button and find out the good news. Yes, if you have music on your device then it will be removed. No, it’s not the headache you think it might be – you can just put it back on there. Have faith in Apple’s poorly worded warning labels and you too can transfer media to your iPhone once again.

Have you experienced something like this yourself?

The post Is Your New iPhone Paired To Another iTunes Library? Don’t Freak Out Yet appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Also for the first time, the iTunes 11 update can be downloaded through the Mac App Store instead of via the application itself, or directly from the Apple website. Over the years iTunes has expanded well beyond a music player. It now serves as a mobile app and iBooks store, as well as a video rental and DVD download outlet.

When you launch the new update, you definitely see differences in the design. It sports a cleaner, more minimalist look, with emphasis on album covers rather than playlists.

Clicking on an album reveals its song list, and play controls.

The background color for the list of songs matches the primary colors of the album itself. Clicking on the “In the Store” button reveals other songs and albums by the selected artist or group. This new feature keeps both the user’s iTunes library and the Store open and accessible at the same time.

The mini player for iTunes has also been expanded so that users get a list of upcoming songs, the ability to search songs, switch to Air Play, as well as the ability to favorite songs and add them to existing playlists.

MakeUseOf will have a full review of iTunes 11 posted soon.

Source: Mashable

The post Apple Releases iTunes 11 With Re-design, Mini-Player, And New Navigation Controls [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Winamp used to be my desktop music player of choice back in the early 2000s when it was the only alternative to Windows Media Player. While I no longer use Winamp on my computer, I do use it on my Android. It’s an effective app that can handle large music libraries without being too slow or laggy. An everyday music player, really.

Let’s take a look at this big name music app and see why it’s retained its status as one of the most popular Android music apps for so long.

Interface

Winamp’s app home screen is simple, clean, and easy to navigate. The first four options will let you browse through your music collection based on the sorting method of your choice: by Artist, Album, Song Title, or Genre. If you have Playlists, you can access them from this screen, too.

At the bottom, there’s a mini-player that is nearly always visible. It’s actually a drawer–you can swipe it upwards and pull out the main media controls; we’ll go more into that soon. At the bottom right, there’s a Winamp logo. If you tap it, it will bring you back to this home screen no matter where you are.

Library & Playback

Browsing through your library is nothing special in Winamp. It’s just a bunch of scrolling, tapping, and that’s it–like most music player apps. Performance wise, I think Winamp isn’t that bad. The scrolling rarely lagged and the tapping felt smooth and responsive to me. That kind of minor detail helps it to feel like a quality app.

If you hold-tap on a music library selection, you can do the following:

• Play: Plays the selection right away. If the selection is an album or an artist, all of the songs within that category will be queued into the Now Playing list.
• Enqueue: Similar to Play, but adds the selection to the end of the Now Playing list. For albums and artists, all of the included songs will be enqueued.
• Add to Playlist: If you have custom playlists, the selection(s) can be added to them.
• Delete: Permanently deletes the selection(s) from your SD card.

At first glance, the playback screen is pretty minimal. You’ve got the song title at the top, the album art in the center, and a progress bar at the bottom with the player controls. The button on the bottom left takes you to the Now Playing list.

But when you tap on the middle of the screen, a small overlay shows up with more options. The name of the album shows at the top and, at the bottom, you can toggle shuffle/repeat, access the equalizer (Pro version only), and search the Internet for more info on the current song/artist.

Features

On the Winamp home screen, there are two options near the bottom: SHOUTcast Radio and Free Music. These are two features you’ll rarely find in other music apps. They don’t exactly boost Winamp into must-have territory, but they could be useful.

SHOUTcast Radio is basically like Internet radio: you can stream online music from SHOUTcast stations. Free Music is similar, allowing you to stream music off of Full CD or download free MP3s from Spinner. Both of these features will use up a lot of data, so make sure you’re on WiFi instead!

Winamp supports music library synchronization. If you use iTunes, you can import and sync your libraries with ease. If you use Windows Media Player, you can actually sync your libraries wirelessly.

And one feature that I found likable was that you can hit Android’s Menu key when playing a certain song and set that song as your ringtone. That could come in handy.

Settings

Winamp doesn’t have many settings to play around with. You can toggle a few options, like automatic USB-mounting and using the lock screen player. Otherwise, there’s not much to see here.

Upgrade

For $4.99, you can upgrade your free version of Winamp to Winamp Pro. Doing so will unlock the audio equalizer (for those of you who are audiophiles), gapless playback, replay gain, as well as the ability to customize the home screen.

Upgrading to Winamp Pro can be done through the Store option on the home screen.

Conclusion

Winamp download link

Winamp is a tried-and-true name–that’s why it’s one of our Best Of Android apps for audio. As a company, Winamp has been around for over a decade, so you can rest assured in knowing that a company doesn’t stay around for that long if they don’t know what they’re doing.

What do you think of Winamp? Love it? Hate it? Prefer something else? Share your thoughts with us in the comments!

The post Winamp: A Fantastic Music App That Rocks Its Competition [Android] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Thankfully, with modern technology, you can quickly figure out what song you’re listening to so you can feed your curiosity and be awesome in front of friends.

About Shazam

The Shazam app for Android is a highly interesting app which allows you to determine what song you are currently listening to. It does this by recording a small section of the song, and then sending it to Shazam’s mother servers to do all the hard work of determining the song. Once it figures this out (which it does at surprisingly speed if the recording is of good quality), it’ll spit out different kinds of information about the song, including the name, artist, genre, and even cover art.

Of course, as I will mention in a bit, Shazam also has a couple of other useful music-related features.

Discover Music

Shazam can be easily navigated as all of its functions are separated into different tabs. The first tab allows you to determine what song you’re currently listening to.

To do this, simply play the music, then tap the screen so that Shazam can start recording.

In a couple seconds, you should have the results in your hand.

History

Under the Tags tab, you can see a list of previous song searches that you’ve made via the first tab. All of the information, as you would see it when freshly searched, is just a tap away. You can even hear a 30 second preview of the song from here as well.

Charts

In the Charts tab, you can see a list of the currently most popular songs. Just like with the Tags tab, you can find information about it as well as listen to a short preview of the song.

Friends

Finally, in the Friends tab, you can look up your friends activity and what they listen to the most. Friends will also be able to see your activity on Shazam. The app uses Facebook to find other friends who use it as well, but the sharing of Shazam information on Facebook is optional.

Installation

Installation, just like any other app, is quite easy to accomplish. Just head over to your respective app store and search for Shazam. You may also follow this link if you’re an Android user or this link if you use an iOS device. After those couple of taps, and a few seconds of waiting, you’ll be ready to go in no time.

Settings

There are a number of settings which can be configured, which include various notification settings, whether Shazam should identify music when it is launched, whether to vibrate when identification is complete, if your current location should be included in the tag. You can also participate in Shazam’s mPOINTS rewards system, which can earn you gift cards to different music stores. You can earn more rewards points by completing in-app achievements and other offers from sponsors.

Conclusion

Shazam is simply one of those apps that definitely make me appreciate the capabilities of today’s technology. While it’s a rather simple use of that technology, it does make a lot of people’s lives easier. If you’re a lover of music, this is a must-have app!

What music-related apps do you use the most? How useful do you think Shazam would be? Let us know in the comments!

The post Discover New Music & What It’s Actually Called With Shazam [Android & iOS] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Ask anyone what their favorite music app for Android is and you’ll get a dozen answers. The worst (or best) part is that each of those answers is perfectly viable. There are so many apps to choose from and they’re all great. So as I present you with doubleTwist Player, I just want you to know that it’s only one of the many powerful apps out there.

Without further ado, let’s take a closer look at this bad boy and see why it deserves all the praise it gets.

iTunes Synchronization

As soon as you install doubleTwist, you’ll be presented with a warm welcome message. Included in the welcome message is a reminder that doubleTwist is not just an Android app, but also a desktop program (for both Windows and Mac) that can be used to quickly synchronize files between your desktop and your Android.

Unfortunately, the synchronization is only for iTunes. If you don’t use iTunes, then you’ll have to manually transfer your music and video files to your Android device and allow doubleTwist to automatically detect them. But if you do use iTunes, it’ll be just a bit more convenient.

Library & Navigation

Here we are at the doubleTwist home screen. Out of the box, doubleTwist can handle music and video files and separates them into two different screens accordingly. Under the Music section, you’ll be able to sort and browse your music based on artists, albums, song titles, and playlists. It’s missing the ability to sort by genre, but that’s just a minor inconvenience.

You can create your own music playlists or you can use doubleTwist’s Smart Playlists that let you listen to songs based on Top Rated or Most Played. doubleTwist also supports subscribing to podcasts and automatic downloads (over 3G and WiFi).

doubleTwist is smooth. Even though I’m on a device that’s over 3 years old, doubleTwist can swipe from one screen to the next without a problem. On top of that, it’s pretty to look at. In terms of visual design, it’s one of the better music apps.

Navigating from song to song is easy and I’ve never found myself frustrated with poor user design. The album view is nice, I must admit, and one cool feature of doubleTwist is that it will download high quality album artwork for your songs if you enable it in the settings.

Music Playback

As far as actual playback goes, there’s nothing to gripe about in doubleTwist, yet there’s nothing to run home about, either. You can play, pause, skip ahead or backwards, and most of the screen is album art. It’s all very typical, even if it does look sleek and shiny. There are also quick buttons for Shuffle and Repeat, if you toggle those frequently.

But one feature that I like a lot is the Up Next list. If you tap the button on the top right of the playback screen, you’ll see a list of all the songs that have been queued up. From the library, you can hold-tap to add songs into this queue, or you can hold-tap on songs in the queue to remove them.

Options

Keeping in line with its simple and easy-to-use philosophy, doubleTwist doesn’t offer too many settings to change. There are some basic enabled/disabled toggles where you can turn certain features on and off. But other than that, there’s little else.

To be honest, I wish that there were more options to play around with, but I just don’t know what those options should be. I’m extremely satisfied with doubleTwist, yet for some reason I feel like there’s something missing in this department. I just can’t put my finger on it.

Upgrades

While doubleTwist is free, you can upgrade to doubleTwist Pro for $9.99. It’s a hefty price, but it all depends on whether or not you think it’s worth it. By upgrading, you gain access to 3 new features:

• Equalizer. Yes, unfortunately, the free version of doubleTwist does not include an audio equalizer. This seems to be a trend throughout most commercialized music apps, and it saddens me greatly.
• AirSync. If plugging in your USB and syncing your files that way is too much on an inconvenience, then doubleTwist Pro lets you sync over 3G or WiFi through AirSync.
• AirPlay. Lets you stream media from your Android device to your Xbox 360, PS3, Sonos, or Apple TV.

Conclusion

doubleTwist is one of the better music apps I’ve seen. It’s very middle-of-the-ground in a lot of what it does. There are much flashier alternatives and there are much more minimalistic alternatives. But if middle-of-the-ground is your style, then doubleTwist is great.

What do you think? Have you used the doubleTwist music app for android before? If so, share your experiences with us. If not, why not?

The post doubleTwist: A Simple & Clean Music App With Desktop Synchronization [Android] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

When you weren’t using Napster’s built-in capabilities, what were you using to listen to all of those MP3s you downloaded? My bet is either Windows Media Player or Winamp. It’s 2012 and I’m still using the same Winamp that was around way back then. Why get rid of a good thing? Consider this article to be my pitch to get you to go back to using one of the web’s simplest media players!

Winamp Lite is still my MP3 player of choice. But why?

The Interface

Take a look at the face of Winamp Lite and compare it to other media players you can think of.

It’s so small and compact and achieves exactly what it needs to. The above screenshot shows all available “windows” of the interface aside from the equalizer (which I’ve never made much use of). Now, you and I both know why an all-around media player would need a more bold and busy interface. If you’re trying to watch a movie, perhaps VLC is a better choice. If you’re looking to load and listen to an MP3 playlist, how can it get any better than this?

The buttons across the bottom allow you to add tracks, load playlists, and more. Changing the volume, enabling shuffle and repeat, and basic controls like starting and pausing your music is obvious to any user from one of the tiniest little interfaces you’ll ever see.

Very Lightweight

Right now, I’ve got a playlist of 3,314 songs actively shuffling and Winamp is only eating at 10MB of memory.

To put that into perspective, my Task Manager process itself (used to find that info) is at 15MB. Firefox, with a few add-ons and around 10 tabs open, is well over 500MB. Winamp Lite should definitely be considered a preferable media player for those of you using netbooks!

Extensive Options

For an application that is so light and simple, Winamp Lite has a lot going for it underneath the hood.

The above screenshot goes to show how customizable the application really is. You’re able to change how Winamp interacts with Windows Explorer, change how Winamp preloads ID3 information of your playlists, play with your playback preferences to tweak Winamp to optimal performance, and more.

Winamp also has an entire library of skins and plugins for you to check out, many of which work in the Lite version. Installing plugins is as simple as dragging and dropping files included in an archive into a folder in the Winamp directory. As the screen shows in the screenshot above, you’re able to customize them.

One feature that I think every media player should have is hotkey support. Winamp Lite does it perfectly. Global hotkeys can interact with your keyboard or with a combination of modifiers and keys.

MP3 hoarders, what more are you looking for in a media player? Winamp Lite is clean, light on resources, and takes care of every technical aspect you’ll need to effectively control your listening experience. Let me know what you think of Winamp Lite in the comments. I know some of you still use it!

The post Want One Of The Simplest Desktop MP3 Players? Winamp Lite Still Exists! [Windows] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

TuneUp costs a one-off $49.95, or can be purchased as a yearly licence for $39.95. Alternatively, you can grab it from the MakeUseOf Rewards program right now for 500 points; or you can download a free trial that will clean up to 50 songs. It works as a plugin with either iTunes or Windows Media Player. Note that it requires an Internet connection to work.

TuneUp Features

The promise of cleaning up your music collection is a certainly a bold one to make; but what exactly does TuneUp do?

• Fixes mislabeled songs – things like “Unknown artist” and “Track 01″; it does this using waveform analysis.
• Adds other missing meta information, like release year or genre. This makes smart playlists a lot more useful, such as “rock music from the 80s”.
• Adds cover art, automatically or by giving you a choice of domestic / international versions.
• Removes duplicates.
• Features a “now playing” tab with lyrics, concert dates and other albums from the current artist.

The features are also heavily customizable. When cleaning your tracks, you need only import the information you want, so if you’d rather they left alone your carefully created genres then you can go right ahead and keep those. Be sure to check these preferences before performing your first clean though, as genre replacement is on by default.

In order to keep track of the cleaning process, I suggest enabling playlist creation via the preferences menu. Now perform an analysis on your collection – mine found about 3,500 songs of 8,000 total which had missing information. It should also have created a special playlist for those, so use that as a source when dragging and dropping into the interface.

Note that the list isn’t dynamic; once cleaned, songs are not removed from it. Alternatively, you can simply pick and choose songs to clean straight from your main library (or do them all); an analysis isn’t neccessary for the plugin to work.

Interface

Drag some files into the cleaning window to get started – you can drag up to 1,000 each time – then let the identification process run.

The main cleaning interface is divided into two sections; definite matches (blue), and likely matches (grey). Clicking on the check mark will accept those matches – you can either do this individually, or on a track by track, album by album basis; or you can simply click “Save all” to accept all the matches. Alternatively, Clear (Cancel) any changes to albums or tracks with the X. If you’re having doubts about a particular album, toggle the full view down and click to play an individual track that it thinks is a match.

If at any point, you think you may have inadvertently mislabelled a track, drag it into the undo tab reverse changes back to its original state.

Though functional, I do find the interface a little fiddly. I think I would have preferred a full application window rather than a compact sidebar. Occasional bugs appeared, like the lack of a check button graphic (it should be next to the X in the screenshots above), though the button itself still worked.

Also, if you have a large collection of mash-ups or audiobooks, I’d also suggest you look carefully at the list as there will be a lot of misclassifications, or better still just remove them from the “to clean” list before starting. That said, it did manage to fix some of my Chinese songs that had been broken by Windows character encoding at some point, giving them the correct titles back.

Lyrics

The most recent update to TuneUp includes the ability to display lyrics, but the keyword is display only – it will not add found lyrics during the clean up process, which is disappointing. Furthermore, if your tracks already have lyrics in the metadata, it won’t display those either – it can only stream what is available on its rather limited lyrics partner.

If you’re looking for a decent solution to grab lyrics for all your songs, or to display them nicely while listening, consider GetLyrical instead.

Summary

If your iTunes consists of mostly popular music that seriously needs kicking into shape, TuneUp is going to perform great for you. It has a fine level control over precisely which information gets pulled or overwritten, and works very well for popular music. You’ll find cover flow suddenly makes a lot more sense when you actually have album artwork; it felt great to actually see images of artists I’d loved over the years but never looked into further.

If your iTunes is full of non-music , foreign tracks, audiobooks, comedy recordings, and all manner of non-standard audio, then you’ll need to be more selective with the cleaning process. It’ll still perform a great job on regular music tracks, but blindly letting identify everything in your collection is going to have you fuming.

Have you used TuneUp? Let us know how it worked out for you in the comments! Alternatively, do you have another preferred way of fixing all your metadata, or do you just not care?

The post Sort Out Your Music Collection with Tune Up for Windows and Mac [Rewards] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Earlier this year, I wrote a compilation of music managers for Android. The music players listed in that article are all great and useful in their own ways, but most of them are far too bloated for my tastes. It’s nice to have certain features, but I soon end up forgetting that they exist. All I want is a quick, painless, and resource-friendly Android music app that doesn’t hog battery power.

And to my surprise, I stumbled upon NanoMusic. “Extremely lightweight” and “simplistic” are underplaying the greatness of this app. If you’re tired of bloat, look no further. NanoMusic may be the solution for you.

Interface

You can think of NanoMusic’s interface as a basic Foobar2000 for the Android: it’s nothing more than a list of songs. There are no playlists here. There are no detail columns, no sorting mechanisms, no album art, no visualizers. What you get is a list of songs and that’s it!

NanoMusic’s theme can be changed in the options. There’s a dark mode, a light mode, a “big dark” mode, and a “big light” mode. There are no complicated control settings here. You install it and you hop right in to play your music.

Features

If feature bloat is what you like in a music player, you might as well look elsewhere. NanoMusic is extraordinary in that it skimps on the features quite thoroughly. You won’t find any equalizers here–nor will you find font settings, per-track volume normalizations, sleep timers, sync options, or anything else.

NanoMusic clocks in at around 100kb in size. It’s tiny in every sense of the word. And though it has no advanced features, it does support a number of audio formats: MP3, OGG, and FLAC. The actual music that shows up in the app is determined by the user with a file directory selector. Nothing fancy.

When I said NanoMusic was simplistic, I really meant it. Other than theme color and filename display, there is literally nothing you can change or alter. I understand that this is a pretty big dealbreaker for most musicheads, but NanoMusic is truly a niche app.

Options

If you’ve gotten this far in the review, you know that I’ve already pointed out how few options there are available. You’ve got the theme selector and the playlist format display–that’s it. Nothing else to see here. Move along.

Conclusion

NanoMusic is perfect for those who don’t care about “playing the player.” If all you want to do is load songs into an app and get them playing ASAP, then NanoMusic is exactly what you want. And because it’s so lightweight, it consumes very little battery, meaning you get more time to listen to your music.

The downside is that the free version is ad-supported. If you want to get rid of them, or if you just want to support the developer, you can upgrade to the paid version of NanoMusic for $2.49. At the time of writing this article, the paid version has no other perks besides ad removal.

The only criticism I have of NanoMusic is that it lacks a lockscreen control. I don’t think that a lockscreen control goes against the whole simplistic design and I think it’d be a welcome feature. Other than that, I hope this app stays as minimalist as possible without succumbing to bloat pressure.

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