Installation is easy. Click through the dialogue boxes and launch the app. The user has the option of a number of different configurations for initial use, although the default setup will give you a single, integrated interface, not unlike many other media players.

Point the application toward your library of choice, or more than one library. Give it few minutes to scan through your files, and you’re ready to start listening. The basic module only used about 30MB of RAM for just playing music.

You have the choice of different module configurations. Below is an example of two separate equalizer displays; with a compact audio control interface and a file navigator. This is a great application that includes audio editing tools, lyric composer, different visualizations, video components, internet radio options, and yet it remains lightweight and friendly to use. All of this comes with a high degree of potential for customizing each module. And, this is just the basic application. This is the free version with no add-ons or plug-ins installed. If this application hung out at Muscle Beach, it would probably stop dead-lifting its 800-pound barbell just to carry your groceries home for you. It is that good.

For a relative unknown in the universe of media players, JetAudio stands out against the backdrop of form-over-function. This piece of software is all functionality. There’s nothing it can do that isn’t meant to directly enhance your listening experience.

At this site, you can share .pls files to broadcast playlists or access those created by others. While not as convenient as other streaming music services, the ability to integrate this functionality into such a feature-rich and robust music player is a real treat.

Even the lyrics component has its own integrated player controls which allow for scrubbing with a slider, incremental fast-forward and rewind controls all included with a text editor. Furthermore, the visualization system can integrate some of the great titles like G-Force or Aeon from Soundspectrum. The JetAudio free version also comes with a backup manager, called JetShell, for archiving your media files.

The paid version of the application includes a number of additional features that extend both the listening possibilities of the free version and its audio editing capabilities. All-in-all, we have only begun to discover the ways in which JetAudio can bring a more inclusive and flexible user listening experience. Yet, it seems as if we have found our new pet software addiction for at least a little while. JetAudio is a music player for music people. It has heart. It is rich in features and configuration options. It does something few applications of any kind manage to do by presenting the option for the user to re-think what is possible in using an application. Rest assured you have not heard the last from this little digital boom box.

XMPlay is still mostly unknown to the majority of Windows users can be explained with the dominance of the other players that are available. Who needs yet another player if there are many available that do their job just fine?

XMPlay on the other hand is different than most. Its developer has concentrated the efforts on producing a lightweight portable music player that is packed with features and compatible with all popular music formats that users might encounter.

Version 3.5.1 of XMPlay has just been released, reason enough for use to take another look at this music player underdog.

XMplay is a music player that can play popular music formats like mp3, ogg or wma automatically with the option to add other formats as plugins. Those plugins are for instance provided to add Flac, Realaudio or Midi support. Plugins are also available to extend the player’s functionality. There are several plugins for popular archiving formats for instance that can be used to play music right from the archives without unpacking them. Themes are also available for the player to change the looks of it.

What you can do with XMPlay:

• Net streaming – All supported file types (including MODs and archives) can be streamed from FTP and HTTP servers (inc. Shoutcast/Icecast/Icecast2), optionally writing a copy to disk, FTP directories and HTML webpages can be scanned for playable files
• Gapless output – Gapless playback of all supported formats, crossfading
• Track information – Displays file/format information, messages/tags, and instrument/sample texts, open webpages from the texts
• Library – A database of your tracks, with directory monitoring, for quick and easy access to the tracks you want to play
• DSP – Automatic gain control (and Replaygain), 9 band equalizer, reverb, plugin support
• Keyboard shortcuts – Fully customizable shortcuts, including global hotkeys
• Integration – Open files/folders from Windows Explorer, drag’n'drop files/folders/shortcuts/URLs, monitor the clipboard for playable URLs, drag’n'drop tracks from XMPlay into other programs, icon customization

The music player is divided into different panels, more precisely in side panels that can be slid into the main panel in the center of the player.

The support site for the player hosts a guide that explains the ins and outs of the player. XMPlay is a solid alternative to the popular audio players that are usually installed on Windows. Its main advantage are its portability and low resource usage along with providing access to all the features and functions one would expect from a software player.

XMPlay 3.5.1. can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It is compatible with all 32-bit editions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 to Windows 7.

In this tutorial I will first introduce you to Aqualung and then I will show you how this unique tool can help to organize your music.

Features

Aqualung offers a number of unique features:

• Audio CDs can be played back and ripped with on-the-fly conversion to WAV, FLAC, or OGG, or MP3.
• Subscribing to RSS and Atom audio podcasts is supported (with automatic download.)
• Almost all sample-based, uncompressed formats (e.g. WAV, AIFF, AU etc.) are supported.
• OSS, ALSA, JACK, PulseAudio, sndio driver support.
• Exporting to external formats from Playlist and Music Store.
• Gap-free playback.
• Convert sample rates.
• Tabbed playlists.
• Comment support.
• Control running instance from command line.
• RVA (relative volume adjustment) control.

As you can see, there are features that make Aqualung more in line with serious listeners than your average player. But even though Aqualung has a bevy of features, don’t expect it to have the interface of, say, a Songbird, or an iTunes. Instead of such a UI, Aqualung keeps everything on the simple side. It’s easy to use, and quick to navigate.

Installation

Aqualung can be found in just about any Linux package management system. You can fire up Synaptic, search for “aqualung” (no quotes), and have the application installed in no time.

Managing your music

Now comes the fun part. Aqualung can do the standard playlist just fine. But what Aqualung also does is Music Stores. A Music store is a database of music you have assigned a title. The philosophy behind the Music Store is that it allows you to have more than one music library from which you can listen to music or create playlists. Think of the Music Stores as Master Playlists. So let’s say you have more then one user that uses one machine. Each user can have a Music Store from which to populate play lists and so on. So how do you create a music store? Simple. Let’s walk through the process.

Music stores

Figure 1

Aqualung works with two windows: The main window and the Music Store window (See Figure 1). If you right click on a blank spot in the Music Store window a menu will appear. From that new menu select Create Empty Store. When you do this, a new window will open where you configure your new store (see Figure 2).

Figure2

The information you need to fill out for your new store is:

• Visible Name: The name you want to give your new store.
• Filename: This store will create an xml file and you have to set the location where this file will be stored.
• Comments: Any comments you wish to add to the store.

Once you have filled out this information, click OK and your store will appear in the Music Store window. Now you have to add music to your new store. To do this right click the store listing and you will notice a number of possibilities. You can:

• Add the store to a playlist.
• Build/Update store from file system.
• Add new artists to store.

and more.  Since there are no files in this music store it might be best to select Build/Update store from file system. When you select this entry a new window will open offering you two choices:

• Directory driven: Follows directory structure. Artists are added on an album basis.
• Independent: Recursive search from the root directory. Artists are added on file basis.

The best choice is Directory Driven. Using this will ensure a better organized store. This, of course, helps to have a fairly well organized file system. If your file system is organized in the iTunes fashion (where all files are randomly named and placed in directories like F00, F01, F02, etc) you might as well go with the second option.

Figure 3

The difference between the two is better understood by looking at the sample shown in Figure 3. In Figure 3 you can see the top portion is a Music Store that was created using the Directory driven choice, whereas the bottom portion was created using the Independent choice.

Now, how do you use this? Simple You can go through any of the music stores and add music to a play list by either double clicking the song or right clicking the song and selecting add to play list.

You can also have multiple play lists open at once. To do this follow these steps:

1. Go to the main window.
2. Right click on an empty spot.
3. Select New Tab.

You now two tabs open where you can have two playlists.

Final thoughts

This tutorial really only scratches the surface of what you can do with Aqualung. In later articles we will deal with some of the other features that help to make this application unique in a world of same ol’ same ol’.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of content channels to choose from the latest movie trailers to the most popular Youtube videos to Ubuntu guides. It is also possible to add feeds that you discover that are not already included in Miro. These feeds will be handled just like any other feed.

It is possible to auto download new posts from the subscribed feeds or to download them manually. Miro offers a built in Torrent client as well which makes it possible to download audio and video torrents to watch them in the interface as well.

Version 2.5 of Miro comes with some serious (that’s what the developers call it) speed and memory usage improvements. It can be downloaded from the nightlies downloads page.

The first method is a search that can be used to find exact matches for artists, songs, albums and so on. Youtube has one of the largest collections of music videos and it usually is pretty easy to find the music that you are looking for. Music that has been discovered can be added to playlists which can be saved after a free account registration at the official website. This is a great way of creating lots of playlists that cover all the songs and genres that the user likes.

The second option that is offered by Muziic is pre-generated playlists that can be accessed from the sidebar of the music player. Those playlists are sorted by genre. About 30 or so genres are available which do contain one or multiple playlists that can be selected for playback.

The video going along with the song can be displayed in the music player if that is something that the user wants to view as well while listening to the song. Besides the playlists that are offered users can import so called channels that have been created by other Muziic users into the application. Channels are also categorized in genres making it easy to pick a suitable one.

The music player is quite interesting as it uses a concept similar to cloud computing to provide access to a large collection of music to users. Users benefit from this by being able to search and access that large database and by saving disk space as virtually no local disk space is required. The only possible drawbacks are the quality of the songs which are definitely not high (but acceptable) quality and the chance that songs vanish if the videos get deleted on Youtube.

Luckily, the guys at Amarok have decided to give the Windows users a taste of what this music player is all about. The process of porting Amarok to Windows is well under way and seems to be going quite well.

All their hard work is paying off. They recently released a version of the program for Windows users to take out for a test run. There is one small thing though. You can’t just download the program. You also have to have the KDE installer and all its binaries.

Techbase has posted a full tutorial on how to go about setting up Amarok for Windows. The first thing you do is download and run the KDE installer. This will allow you to run all KDE apps (like Amarok) on your Windows machine. Apart from the installer, you will also need to download some libraries. Otherwise you’ll wind up with ‘missing dlls’ and other similar error messages.

Once you’ve set up KDE on your machine, do a test run to check if it is working properly. Once past this stage, download the Amarok package and run it on your machine. Amarok will be installed and all ready for you to try out.

I’m not quite jumping for joy yet. The KDE installer and its binaries are well over 200 MB to download, which is huge for me since I don’t have a very fast connection. Plus I’m pretty much command-line challenged and I’m a little scared that I’ll screw something up and suffer the wrath of the other folks who use the machine. Basically, I haven’t decided yet. Maybe I’ll give it a shot over the weekend.

Are you going to give Amarok a try? What did you like / not like about it? Linux users, what’s the best and worst thing you’ve noticed about Amarok? Let’s hear your voices in the comments.

Listening to music only needs a software program that does the needful. This brings me to my question for all the readers. What program do you use to listen to music on your PC? I know it sounds a little strange but I’m curious about preferences of the folks who visit Ghacks.

There are a lot of audio players out there. For most people, I guess it doesn’t make that big a difference as long as it plays the songs. But I know some people who are vary particular. How did you select your player? Did you like how it looked or how you could customize it? Were you looking for something that could play specific audio formats?

I’ll start the ball rolling. I listen to music on my computer everyday and my player of choice is Winamp 2.8. Yeah, I know it’s old but what can I say. I started using it 8 years ago and I guess it’s grown on me. I want to try the Linux player Amarok though. With all the rave reviews I keep hearing, I can’t wait for it to be developed for Windows.

Some of the other players I know about are Media Monkey, iTunes, Songbird, Foobar2000, etc. Drop me a line and tell me what your favorite player is and why.

It supports all major audio formats such as mp3 and ogg format, plays internet radio streams, supports playlists, compressed files, library functions, skins, plugins and a lot more. Did I mention that it is possible to save mp3 streams that are automatically named to your hard drive ?

The XMPlay support site lists 70 skins and more than 200 plugins that can be installed to enhance the music player even further. You do need to create the directories for skins and plugins though. They are subdirectories of the root directory named Skins and Plugins.

Just copy the files into those directories and restart XMPlay to enable them. Several plugins exist for playing audio formats that are not that common. You can enable flac, mp4 or aac support for instance using plugins.

Oh, I forgot to mention that it uses only 6 Megabytes of Ram when playing an Internet radio stream while Winamp uses more than 20 Megabytes (the smallest Winamp version that is).

XMPlay is by far the best mp3 player that I have been using. Goodbye Winamp..