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: 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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