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: 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: 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 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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