Exploring music-media Centers: Jinzora

Jinzora
In one of my earlier entries, we took a look at Subsonic, a media center used to stream music from one computer to other computers on a network. Jinzora is another such music player/organizer.

Unlike Subsonic which is build in Java, Jinzora is built with PHP. While Subsonic can run as a standalone application or as an application within an application server like Tomcat, Jinzora is run as a web application on a Apache web server.

Jinzora is an open source application and can be accessed from a browser on a computer or any other mobile device. It offers better eye candy but besides that it is very similar to Subsonic in functionality. Like subsonic, Jinzora has a search utility and displays album info.

As Jinzora runs within Apache, and as Apache is a cross platform web server, Jinzora can run both on Linux and Windows systems.

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Exploring Media Centers: Moovida

Moovida (formerly Elisa) is yet another open source media player that runs on both Windows and Linux. It ofers a decent menu, though a bit dark for my taste. It has all the features one expects from a media player: The ability to play video and audio, the ability to set up network players, etc. Moodia also comes with quite a few plugins to play content from Internet sites. These include Vimeo, YouTube, CNN news, TED talks,etc.

Unfortunately for Moovida, it exists in the same era as Boxee and XBMC. When compared with either, Moodiva pales in comparison both in features or in the number of plugins offered.

As one would expect, my verdict is: Stick with XBMC and/or Boxee.

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Exploring music-media centers: Songbird

SongBird
In my previous post, we saw some two awesome media centers, Boxee and XBMC. However, when one needs to organize only music files on  one or more drives connected to a computer or or one's laptop and also have the ability to access music from Internet streaming sites  for music, then music media centers like Songbird may be worth looking at.

Songbird was once called the iTunes killer. However, it did not live up to the hype. It is still a worthy contender to iTunes and others in its own league like DoubleTwist and Winamp.

Songbird is an opensource, cross-platform music mediacenter/organizer that can run both on Linux and Windows. Included with the music-center are tools to buy music from 7digital Music store,listen to  Shoutcast radio and mashtape, a tool  to download music and artist information. Songbird has tools to import and export music lists, support for iTunes and can play a variety of audio formats including mp3, vorbis, flac, wma and aac.

Songbird offers discography, album information, etc. for songs played in a neat interface that also includes a search feature.Other features include the ability to create smart playlists and watch folders .  Songbird also comes with development tools to build custom plugins or add-ons for enhanced functionality.The songbird website has several add-ons one may use to customize her installation of Songbird.

One setback I have found with Songbird is that I cannot mount network drives on  Linux. On Windows mapped drives perform badly with Songbird. This means that songbird can only access media files on internal and external drives connected to a local computer. All in all, Songbird is a decent media manager that could be better.

Here are some more articles on Songbird.

Songbird 1.2 Integrates into iTunes and iPods

Songbird 1.1 Grabs Album Art in One Step, Runs Lighter and Faster

Killer Add-ons Make Songbird So Much Better

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