gHacks technology news » audio player http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:26:04 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Miro 2.5 RC1 Released http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/08/miro-2-5-rc1-released/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/08/miro-2-5-rc1-released/#comments Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:42:17 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=14243 miro25The Miro team has released the first release candidate of the upcoming Miro 2.5 version. Miro is a very convenient media player that combines Internet media with local media. It offers one of the most sophisticated and easy to use interfaces. Users can integrate their audio and video files in Miro but the main advantage is the ability to subscribe to channels to download and watch their content in the player. It is pretty much like RSS feeds only that the content is not only text but also video and audio content.

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.

miro

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.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/07/08/miro-2-5-rc1-released/feed/ 1 Use Youtube As Your Music Collection With Muziic http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/27/use-youtube-as-your-music-collection-with-muziic/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/27/use-youtube-as-your-music-collection-with-muziic/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:02:19 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/27/use-youtube-as-your-music-collection-with-muziic/ With always on broadband connections one does not really need music on his computer system to listen to music all day long. First there is Internet Radio which delivers music by genre. If a user wants to select the songs instead a music player like Muziic comes in handy. Muziic puts the entire Youtube library at the user’s disposal. It offers two ways of accessing all the music that has been uploaded to Youtube in the form of videos.

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.

youtube music player

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.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/27/use-youtube-as-your-music-collection-with-muziic/feed/ 3 Amarok is now Available for Windows http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/08/amarok-is-now-available-for-windows/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/08/amarok-is-now-available-for-windows/#comments Thu, 08 May 2008 17:13:48 +0000 Cheryl http://www.ghacks.net/?p=4055 In my last post about everyone’s preferred music player, I mentioned that I was dying to try out the Linux player Amarok because I’d heard great things about. There’s just one problem: I’m a Windows user.

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.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/08/amarok-is-now-available-for-windows/feed/ 21 Which Audio Player are You Using? http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/04/which-audio-player-are-you-using/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/04/which-audio-player-are-you-using/#comments Sun, 04 May 2008 16:02:56 +0000 Cheryl http://www.ghacks.net/?p=4007 You can’t ignore the fact that at some point of time, you’ll listen to music on your computer. Whether it’s a CD, mp3, or some internet radio, you have to admit that it’s a great way to keep yourself occupied.

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.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/05/04/which-audio-player-are-you-using/feed/ 81 XMPlay a lightweight audio player http://www.ghacks.net/2007/05/23/xmplay-a-lightweight-audio-player/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/05/23/xmplay-a-lightweight-audio-player/#comments Wed, 23 May 2007 20:37:43 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/05/23/xmplay-a-lightweight-audio-player/ I was looking very hard to find a replacement for my favorite audio player Winamp and found a ultra-lightweight alternative with an exceptional functionality called XMPlay. This audio player which has a size of only 300 Kilobytes does not have to be installed and can be run from any location.

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 ?

xmplay audio player default skin

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..

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