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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