Exploring Music-Media Centers: Doubletwist

DoubleTwist
Intended to be an iTunes replacement, DoubleTwist is a music center for your laptop or desktop that offers sync-support for a number of devices like the Android, the PSP, the Blackberry and the Palm-Pre.
As a substitute for the Apple Store, DoubleTwist allows you to purchase music from Amazon. The UI is fairly spartan, providing album art and support for creating libraries from your hard drives or devices. You can also create some playlists on DoubleTwist. Doubletwist can also play videos.

Unlike Winamp and Songbird, DoubleTwist does not offer any plugin and add-on development support or the ability to play Internet content. Doubletwist does provide an Api to add additional hardware support. DoubleTwist is too simplistic to pose any threat to iTunes, Winamp or Songbird.

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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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