Exploring Music-Media centers: MediaMonkey

By rajivram
Mediamonkey is another music media center/organizer for your desktop that offers compatibility with iPhones, Palm Pres and Androids. Like all other music centers the UI features Album art, libraries and playlists. Mediamonkey can play many formats of music files. Like WInamp, it offers addons(plugins) to play music from Last Fm,etc, provisions for skins and virtualizations.

Developers can use scripting tools to create plugins for mediamonkey. MediaMonkey also offers Winamp API support. The default UI is not as slick as Winamp but MediaMoney makes a decent music center. It comes in two versions, a free version and a 'Gold' version with more features.

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Exploring music-media centers: Winamp

Winamp


Winamp is another music center similar to Songbird or Doubletwist.It has been around for a while and has grown from music player to music organizer. If you wish to organize music media local to your computer or laptop (Windows only), then Winamp is a great choice.Winamp can also play some video formats.

Winamp's features include a slick interface, equalizers, artist bios and album infos and search functionality. Though not open source, like Songbird Winamp provides a SDK for developers to develop tools and plugins. The website provides numerous skins to customize the look and feel of your winamp player. The site also includes provides numerous plugins including one to access Internet Radio called Shoutcast.

Using the Shoutcast plugin with Winamp , you could also create your own Internet Radio station that can stream music from your media collection organized in Winamp. The station can be made accessible on your network or on the internet.

Other features include visualizations,CD ripping, the ability to buy concert tickets, iTunes support, native language support and more. Winamp comes with in a basic version, a 'lite' version and a paid  version. It is a great choice for organizing you music on a desktop or laptop.

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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 music-media Centers: Subsonic

Subsonic
While iTunes, Songbird and Winamp are great for organizing your music on a single desktop, they cannot be used to stream music to other computers either on your home network or anywhere on the internet. If you wish to access your music collection from a web browser through a slick interface, you may want to consider Subsonic.

Subsonic is a java based application that can organize and give access to your mp3 collection on a computer on other computers through any browser.  It can run on both Windows and Linux boxes as a stand-alone server application. A 'war' implementation of Subsonic can also be deployed on any Java application server like Tomcat.

Subsonic is a great looking application and provides album art and also can automatically search for a display lyrics for your songs as they play. It is very easy to install and configure too.

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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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Everything XBMC

Judging by the traffic on this blog, there seems to be a lot of interest in XBMC, the open source media center which was initially made for the XBox classic, but has now become a full fledged media center in its own right for many platforms. I have compiled a list of links below on XBMC that I found very helpful.

The XBMC site: This is the main XBMC site that has all the latest information and downloads for XMBC on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms.

XBMC for the XBox: For a number of reasons, the XBMC site does not include a donwload for the XBox. For the latest versions of XBMC for the XBox, this is where you go.

XBMC Plugins source tree: If you are familiar with checking out code with SVN, you can download most of the XBMC plugins at this URL. The plugins enable you to access online content from a multitude of sources like CBS, NBC universal, You Tube and so on. You can also access online music from sources like Last Fm.

Note: There is no XBMC plugin that I know that works with Hulu or Fancast as of this writing.

Getting XBMC on the XBox: (The old way) This article by Gina Trapani introduced the world of XBMC to me. I had little trouble getting it to run on the XBox. While it is an amazing feet getting an XBMC to run on a 64MB machine(XBox), people beginning their adventure with XBox are advised try to install it and test it out on a laptop or invest in a $200 nettop PC. (See below). Besides, Gamestop has stopped selling used XBoxes for $50. You'll have to get one off ebay if you do not have them already.
Running XBMC on a Net top PC: (the new way) This article by Adam Pash details how to install XBMC ona $200 nettop PC. The Acer Aspire Revo Nettop is a powerful nettop that comes with 1GB of memory and a powerful graphics card. This article leads you through a 'Live XBMC' install on the nettop.

Lifehacker offers numerous tips on customizing XBMC after you install it.

Hope you find these links useful for you.

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