In the first part of How to Improve Your iTunes Experience, I listed a few tips to improve your music experience using only your existing music library. Here’s a quick recap: firstly, organize and properly tag your music so that you know what you’re listening to, will be able to find them quicker and easier; as well as allowing iTunes Genius to do its job by selecting songs which it thinks you may like.
What I’m not going to do in this review is mention the word ‘iPod-killer’ because in the past that has seemed to be pretty bad for business! I will say this though…before the Zune 3.0 update, the choice between a Zune or an iPod was essentially being made by those who would avoid an iPod at all costs, just for the sake of non-conformity.
As of the Zune 3.0 update however the Zune has become a fantastic product, enough so that I actually went and bought one myself, a 120 gigabyte Zune I ordered from America and got sent here to Australia. The whole thing has seriously impressed me and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the product for anyone looking to replace their MP3 player.
I love my music and everything else that goes along with it. I love the fact that in my iTunes, every song is properly labelled, is nicely arranged alphabetically by artist and have their particular album artwork attached in high resolution. It is so much easier to search for the songs you want when almost all the fields (i.e. genre, artist, album, year) are completed. Every little bit of information helps Genius to find the songs which match the ones you are listening to, creating a playlist which suits your current musical mood.
Amarok, Rhythmbox and Banshee are a few of the popular music players in Linux. They are great in features and have received plenty of good reviews. But what is unknown to many is that there are a lot of other music players for Linux which are also great in features, but are hidden in some corners of the world.
If you are willing to try something out of the box, here are 5 great alternative music players that you can use in your Linux desktop.
Sometime back we did a poll here at Make Use Of asking our readers about their favorite music player. I was just going through the comments in that poll and one of the comments about Media JukeBox caught my attention. It prompted me to download and try out this music manager and I can safely say that I finally found an awesome tool which can effectively manage the big and badly scattered collection of music files in my computer.
Media JukeBox has to be the best free music jukebox available which boasts some cool features which no other free music organizer can boast of (at least among those which I’ve tried ).
Jogli is a new player in the music search engine market and I can say without a doubt that it has the potential to give the established players a run for their money. It indexes music made up of songs, albums and videos from around the web and presents them in a neat interface with all the stuff organized in a single page. It claims to index almost 12 million songs, most of them in the form of YouTube videos.
Although Jogli does not necessarily require registration, I recommend that you do register because then you will get access to all the features like saving your playlists and creating a Jogli profile.
If you’re not familiar with Songbird then here’s an article by Mark from a few months back in case you missed it.
I vaguely remember trying Songbird years ago and soon gave up due to it being hopelessly slow and buggy, but considering it’s still only in alpha (0.6.2) I can understand.
After reading Mark’s article I was motivated to try it out again.
I discovered huge improvements and while there are still performance issues, its acceptable and usable and has a great default theme. Music libraries of 10,000 songs are now comfortably supported and development moves every bit closer to beta.
Everyone has a music player, it’s one of those programs that most of us use on a daily basis. I am sure you must have tried several music players over the years and now found your favorite. So like we did in the past, we are asking you to vote on it. Help us find the best music player out there (at least among MakeUseOf readers).
I tried to include all popular music players, but I am pretty sure I must have missed a few. If your favorite media player is not listed then please let us know about it in comments. Thanks!
While we have mentioned SharePod in our free iPod tools round-up before, I wanted to take a closer look at this free iPod manager program that is designed to sync and manage my iPod.
To install SharePod, visit the SharePod download site and download the .zip file. Once you unzip it, you can either drag and drop SharePod onto your iPod or run SharePod directly from your hard drive. Because it does not require any installation to your hard drive or “Programs” folder, you can also install it onto your USB or flash drive. This is great if you use different computers or want to get some music from a friend’s computer without using iTunes.
There are numerous different free streaming music websites on the internet these days, yet not many of them are any good. I recently found Grooveshark, a free, legal online music streaming website, that is largely defined by its large user community.
It is, as well, becoming a hassle to even find good websites that offer music streaming for free, as they commonly have downsides that range from corrupt links to having a terrible user interface. Fortunately Grooveshark is awesome in all these fields.
One of the great benefits of the internet is that more information, arts and culture have become freely available. But if the RIAA has its way, it’ll be less of the “free” thank you very much as music artists slowly come to terms with the fact that the CD is dying a slow death and most people get their music these days by illegally downloading it. You may not like that fact but nevertheless it’s still a fact of life, along with death and taxes.
Adobe AIR is having quite a buzz at the moment around the internet. They are trying to bring more of the web directly on to your desktop, and they seem to be having quite a successful time achieving this. AIR actually stands for “Adobe Integrated Runtime”, and this article looks at some of the best free applications using AIR. If you have no idea what this Adobe AIR thing is all about, you can simply think of it as a program that allows you to run certain web services like desktop programs. In most cases this results in faster and better looking user interface.
As a big fan of Firefox, I am always interested in any other projects that Mozilla might be dabbling in. Yesterday I began testing Songbird which is Mozilla’s open-source version of Apple’s iTunes music player.
Songbird has the same basic design as iTunes but it’s black (default skin) and with added functionality. As with iTunes, you can import your music, subscribe to podcasts, create playlists, rate each song, synchronise your playlists with your computer files and so on.
But let’s take a look at what makes Songbird different from iTunes.
Television sets and CD players are rapidly becoming a thing of the past for me. I spend most of my waking day in front of the computer and so I have adopted the practice of having DVD’s and CD’s playing in the top right hand corner of the screen while I work. Whether it’s a DVD rental from the shop, BBC streaming news broadcasts or the new iTunes download, media players have become an essential part of my internet life.
Here’s a brief selection of the media players I have encountered over the past few years.
Here you go, one more not to be missed MakeUseOf list, now it’s about ‘Music Videos’. In particular, about web services letting you freely stream full-length music videos, create video playlists, share them with friends and so on. From basic music video link aggregators and search engines to feature-filled online music channels. Enjoy!
(1) Seeqpod
About: A+ service that aggregates music videos from Youtube and similar biggies and presents them, in an intuitive, fast loading, well-designed and easy-to-navigate interface. (Special thanks to Jen, for tipping us about it.)
Extra Features: 1. create/share/playback playlists, 2. in-built Audio/Video player, 3. embed playlists to your web profile, 4. submit videos, 5. view live searches performed by other users.
Another great product of web2.0 era is Pandora, an incredibly cool service with awesome user interface. Pandora let users listen to their favourite songs and discover similar genre songs.
How it works?
It is very simple, all you need to do is to create so called radio stations. To create a radio station following guidelines provided on pandora.com. Interface is very nice and straightforward I doubt you will experience any trouble doing it. Start with entering your favourite song, artist or album.
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