The developer of AIMP has just released a first beta of AIMP3, and boy does it look good.

One of the biggest changes in AIMP3 is a completely revamped interface design wise. The controls have remained the same more or less though. New users find many controls in the upper left corner of the play window to configure the extensive settings of the music player.

Major changes that are mentioned on the (Russian) project site are:

• New style of program and project as a whole
• Full support for translucent texture covers
• Own audio engine (the system audio output)
• Completely reworked music library
• Full support for ReplayGain

All changes are visible on this page. It is best to use a translation service like Google Translate to navigate the website, unless Russian is one of the languages understood.

The audio library can be filled with music from local hard drives, remote drives, removable drives and playlists. It furthermore offers access to IceCast, ShoutCast and custom Internet radio stations straight from the interface.

The core features are all included in the beta, from recording Internet radio over the cover art downloader and LastFM Scrobbler to the tag editor and alarm clock. Users who spend some time using AIMP3 will find a lot of features that may be very useful for them.

AIMP3 is available for download at the developer site. The site links only to file hosting sites for the download. A scan at Virus Total reported a clean file except for one hit that is likely a false positive.

Users need to select English as the language during installation for an English software interface.

In this instance I am going to show you how to use the Nautilus Actions tool to directly add music to your Rhythmbox Play Queue. Although the action will not initiate the playing of the music, it’s a very easy way to fill up your play queue.

A few notes

First and foremost, in order for this to work (outside of making sure you have everything installed) the music you will add from Nautilus must already be in your Rhythmbox library. This action takes advantage of the Rhythmbox command line tool rhythmbox-client which can not actually add music to the library. We can, however, create an action that will both enqueue the music AND begin playing the music. That is exactly what we are going to do.

A piece to install

In case you don’t already have Nautilus Actions installed, you will need to do so. This is very simple to do if you follow these steps:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software Utility.
2. Search for “nautilus” (no quotes).
3. Mark Nautilus Actions for installation.
4. Okay any dependencies that might be necessary.
5. Click Apply to install.

Once the installation is complete, you can then close the Add/Remove Software Tool and get ready to work.

Creating the action

Figure 1

The first step is to start up the Nautilus Actions Configuration Tool. To do this click System > Preferences > Nautilus Actions Which will open up the tool in question. When you first open up this tool it will be empty of actions. To create an action click File > New Action. This will open the New Action tabs (see Figure 1) where you will begin to create what you need.

Now, let’s take a look at what you need to configure in order to enable an action to both add to and play from your Rhythmbox play list. We’ll look at this tab by tab.

Action

Under the action tab, you need to do the following:

• Check “Display item in selection context menu”
• Check “Display item in location context menu”
• Enter “Add and Play” (no quotes) in the Context label section.
• Check “Display item in the toolbar”
• Enter “Enqueue and Play Music” in the Tooltip section.
• Select an icon to be displayed from the drop down.
• Check “Enabled” under Action properties.

Command

Under the Command section of the command tab, you need to do the following:

• Enter /usr/bin/rhythmbox-client in the Path section.
• Enter --enqueue %M --play in the Parameters section.

Conditions

Under the Conditions tab, you need to do the following:

• Enter *.mp3; *.flacc; *.acc; *.ogg in the Filenames section. NOTE: You can add as many file types as you need here.
• Enter audio/* in the Mimetypes section.
• Check “Both”.
• Check “Appears if selection has multiple files or folders”

Figure 2

That’s it. Now you have to save the action by clicking the Save button (or clicking File > Save). The final step is to restart nautilus with the command nautilus -q. After you restart Nautilus open up Nautilus to your ~/Music folder (or where ever you house your collection) and notice the new icons (see Figure 2) in the upper right corner of the Nautilus window. In my sample I have created two actions: One that only adds music and the other that adds and then plays music. Select the folder you want to add and then press the icon for your action and the music will be added to the queue and Rhytmbox will start playing.

Final thoughts

It’s amazing how flexible Nautilus is. Even just a file manager can be so much more than that in the world of Linux. And what’s best…you can create so many different actions with Nautilus to perfectly suit your needs.

Easy Tag is an open source application available for Linux and Windows that allows you edit tags for the following file types:

• MP3
• MP2
• MP4/AAC
• FLAC
• Ogg Vorbis
• MusePack
• Monkey’s Audio
• WavPack

And what’s best about Easy Tag is that you most likely won’t have to manually edit all of those files.

Simple installation

You will find Easy Tag in your distribution repository, so you can fire up Synaptic, search for “easytag” (no quotes), select the package for installation, and click Apply to install.  Or, if you prefer command line, you could install with a command like yum install easytag. Once installed, you will find Easy Tag in your Audio (or Sound and Video) menu.

How Easy Tag works for you

Figure 1

There are two painless ways Easy Tag can be used: Automatic tag recognition and CDDB search. Althought it might be tempting to use the automatic tag recognition, the best, and most reliable method is using the CDDB choice. So when you fire up Easy Tag (and after it searches through your music library) you will see that it lists all of your music in the middle pane (see Figure 1).  What you see, in Figure 1, is a section of files with incorrect tags. You know a file has an incorrect tag if it is listed in red. Now let’s fix those tracks.

The best way to do this is to select an entire

Figure 2

album of tracks. Although it looks like all of the tracks for the Rush album Signals are correct, there is something amiss. So I will highlight all of those tracks and right click the selections. From the right click menu select CDDB search. When the new window opens (see Figure 2) select the correct listing and then click Apply. It will seem as if nothing has happened, but something has. Click the Close button. Now you have to save the changes. Go the the File menu and select Save. A small window will appear for each change you are about to make (See figure 2). Click Yes for each change (unless you check the “Repeat action…” checkbox).

When the save is complete you can go back to the track listings and see that those files are no longer listed in red. Their tags are now correct.

Figure 3

If your CDDB search comes up with no results, then you might have to reconfigure the server Easy Tag uses. To do this to go Settings > Preferences and then click the CD Database tag (see Figure 3).  You can change the server settings for automatic and manual searches. When I changed mine to freedb.freedb.org, all of my troubles went away.

Final thoughts

Use Easy Tag to clean up your music collection tags. Not only does this make a tedious task simpler, it keeps your music collection clean so that music players can easily read and display the tags for your music files.

Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) is utilised on a range of devices, but especially so by Creative. Creative Zens (and their variants) utilise the protocol. Whilst the Creative NOMAD isn’t MTP, it too uses an awkward protocol not natively supported by OS X. The infamous Zune (in the eyes of an Apple fanboy) too uses MTP, however, Microsoft make it very difficult to transfer data to.

XNJB is a piece of software that provides a graphical front-end to a libnjb and libmtp: free and open source libraries that allow communication with devices like Creative NOMADs and Creative Zens. Unfortunately, neither support the Zune, due to additional restrictions Microsoft put in place. The libraries work on other POSIX operating systems, like Linux, but XNJB does not.

XNJB allows users to upload and download songs from their media players, for ID3 data to be edited and devices searched. All of this has to be done within the software; it is not integrated into iTunes or Finder.

The transfer of data felt a bit slow to me, but I expect this is primarily due to the messiness of my library and the nature of Media Transfer Protocol.

This software is, however, a useful tool when you first got the Mac. I do, though, doubt you could realistically continue to use a MTP device successfully with OS X. Naturally, you could use it inside Boot Camp or a virtual machine, but in my opinion, that too is not an ideal option.

Compatible devices are listed on their website.

AIMP is a music player that might not be mentioned that often. The main reason why that is the case is surely the Russian website that is keeping lots of users at bay. Some might spot the player on download portals like Softpedia and those are usually the ones who stick with it after installing and testing the player.

AIMP comes with an impressive design and functionality that leaves most music players behind. It is low on resource usage, provides an impressive sound, great design, an audio converter, CD ripper and Internet radio ripper among other things.

The official website contains a few plugins and skins that can be added to the player but one feature that the player excels in is the compatibility to many Winamp plugins.

One of the winners of a Ghacks t-shirt mentioned a few Winamp plugins that were keeping him from changing to AIMP. A quick research revealed that it was possible to add the plugins to AIMP as well. He mentioned the following three plugins: Minilyrics, DFX and Ozone.

The principle is basically the same for all plugins:

• Download the plugin to the computer.
• Try to extract it using a packer. If that is not working install it. All three plugins could be installed without having Winamp installed. Some might require Winamp though.
• Go to the directory where the files have been extracted / installed into.
• It is usually enough to copy the plugin dll files to the AIMP2/plugins directory. In the case of DFX it is the dsp_dfx.dll, for Ozone it is dsp_iZOzoneFree.dll while Minilyrics requires two: gen_MiniLyrics.dll and MiniLyrics.dll

A rule of thumb. If in doubt copy all files into the directory. AIMP will tell you if something is missing upon activation of the plugin. This is how you do that:

A click on the top left icon will display a menu. Choosing plugins from that menu will open the AIMP Plugin Manager which displays all loaded (meaning active) and unloaded plugins.

New plugins that have been placed in the plugins folder can be activated by selecting them with a left click and clicking on Load afterwards. You will see a message window if something is not right. If the wrong dll has been moved into the plugin directory no plugin will be shown under the Unloaded Plugins tab.

Some plugins, like the DSP ones, require activating in the options of AIMP. A click on the same icon that brought you into the Plugin Manager will also bring you in the DSP Manager. There you can select the Winamp DSP Plugin that has been previously loaded into AIMP.

Not all plugins will work but many will. It is just a matter of trying.

Froddle Pod is such an iTunes alternative. It certainly is not as feature rich as iTunes but it provides access to the main features that iPod owners need: It can copy music and videos from and to an iPod which is definitely the main feature that any iTunes alternative should support.

The software can also backup and restore all data that is stored on an iPod. Another feature is music normalization for all or selected music on the iPod. It is currently unclear if it supports album art.

Supported are the following iPod models currently: iPod Nano (all), iPod Mini (all), iPod Classic (3rd to 6th generation). No support for the Apple iPhone or iPod Touch yet.

The software did check for and download the Microsoft Visual J# Distributable which takes up 80 Megabytes of space on the hard drive.

The [Play] link changes into a [Hide Player] link which when clicked hides the embedded player again normalizing the website in the progress. This is an excellent way to listen to the first few seconds of a mp3 before making the decision whether you want to download it completely.

The mp3 is actually downloaded to the user’s cache which would mean that it would be possible to grab it right of the cache instead of downloading it again. Great script Adam !

I like this way because I can listen to music directly without having to open an external application, in this case the music player.

He has to select the folder from which the files are copied – subfolders are automatically included in the process -, a destination drive or folder, a size that should be copied and the file extension. The first two are obvious while the latter two require a short explanation. Size defines the total size of all files that are copied. If you pick for instance 1000 Megabyte as the size and mp3 as the file extension mp3 files with a total size of about 1000 Megabytes will be copied, never more than that of course to avoid the dreaded disk is full message.

The file extension can be any file extension which means you can also copy avi files, documents, images or anything else that you can think of randomly to the folder or hard drive.It is furthermore possible to add additional file extensions with the “;” separator.

Two optional check boxes are available: Clear Destination Dir deletes all files in the destination dir so that it is empty before the copy begins. Replace Existing Files overwrites existing files without asking during the copying.

The configuration can be saved and loaded which is nice if you want to use the program every now and then to load new files on the device. It is even possible to use it once every day before going to school to start the day with a fresh random selection of your music.

Mix2Stix requires Java which has to be installed on the system. The source is included in the distribution.

The software that connects mp3 players, mobile phones and handhelds to iTunes is called iTunes Agent. Three devices are already configured in iTunes Agent. A Generic Player, Sony Ericsson Walkman Phone and the Sony PSP. New devices can be added with ease to the configuration and are recognized by defining a specific folder of that device in the configuration. For the Sony PSP that folder would be PSP for instance.

Might sound complicated but it is not. Just look at the folder structure of your device and use the information you discover. Other values that have to be added are the path of the music folder on the device, the synchronize pattern and the association with a playlist.

The devices can then be synchronized using the system tray. A right-click on the iTunes Agent icon opens a menu that offers synchronization.

Although some reviewers expressed their doubts about its design, especially the placement of the buttons when compared to the high-end devices, I must say that I actually do like it and don’t have the least problem with the easy navigation at all. There are 3 color versions of this smallish block that you can choose from – black-silver, graphite and pink.

Since the size is really tiny (70 x 43 x 11.5 mm), you’d have no trouble carrying it anywhere.

The supported formats are MP3, WMA (DRM 9&10), AVI, JPG, TXT, VRA which is enough to have fun with it. Videos need to be converted to a particular AVI format/size to be played on a 2-inch display with 262 000 colors. Details in the videos played on this device are fairly sufficient to watch just about anything on the go in a very good picture quality. Images can be of any size. Listen to the radio using built-in FM tuner, read lyrics or any other text file in a text viewer or record the surroundings using a miniature mike inside the device.

Just note that the quality of recording isn’t too high if you don’t put it near the source so that you shouldn’t be disappointed later on. Built-in Li-Pol accumulator can support this device for up to 15 hours and can be recharged very quickly via USB link (standalone recharger is not included in the package). I’d also recommend buying other earphones than the default ones because they lower the playback quality a little bit.

Other functions of this player would be support for ID3 tags, 8-mode equalizer including one dedicated to your custom settings, 3 bookmarks in text files, support for language study (meaning several ways of repeating) and a single preinstalled game – Tetris. For its price/function rate this little entertainer is a very good choice and has been serving me very well for several weeks. I don’t have a single complaint myself.

I never quite understood why someone would use Winamp to play videos because this functionality was introduced into Winamp when several other great software video players like VLC, Mplayer or BSPlayer were already in existence. I therefor decided to compare the lite version of Winamp 5.5 against my favorite music player XMPlay.

The Winamp executable has a file size of roughly 2.2 Megabytes while XMPlay one of 340 Kilobytes. The XMPlay folder has a size of 1.9 Megabytes after installation while Winamp’s folder one of 6.6 Megabytes. The first noticeable difference can be found if you open both players without a song and take a look at the Windows task manager.

XMPlay uses roughly 550 Kilobytes of memory in idle state while Winamp lite uses 1.37 Megabytes. I decided to load a seven Megabyte mp3 file into both players. XMPlay was using 2.52 Megabytes afterwards while Winamp 5.5 lite was using 3.88 Megabytes. The difference between both players rose from roughly 800 Kilobyte in idle state to 1.3 Megabytes in idle state with a 7 Megabyte file in the playlist.

I pressed the play button in both players and switched back to the task manager. Winamp 5.5 lite was now using 6.24 Megabytes of memory while XMPlay was using 3.84. The difference rose to 2.4 Megabytes.

Last but not least I decided to see how both players would do when playing Internet radio streams. XMplay was using 3.53 Megabytes while playing a 128 Kbit stream while Winamp used 7.66 Megabytes.

The conclusion is that XMPlay has a far better memory management than Winamp. The real important state is of course when playing music files in the music player and this is where XMPlay really excels. This means, if you really want a “lite” player you should switch to XMPlay instead of Winamp 5.5 lite.

Read More:

XMPlay Homepage
Winamp 5.5 beta download

The new version is now available in three languages which are German, English and Spanish. Other changes include reduced memory usage, proxy support, support for the three file extensions wma, wmv and asf, new folder structures and better handling of duplicate playlists.

Itunes Sync should work with most mp3 players on the market, the developer obviously has no way of testing his software with all players available. Some users send in information regarding compatibility with their mp3 player but I suggest you simply try it out and see if iTunes Sync works with your player.

The software has a size of only 450 Kilobyte and requires the Microsoft .net framwork 2.0

Read More:

iTunes Sync Homepage

And one of them decided to write a program called iTunes Sync that would sync the playlists in iTunes with a lot of mp3 players from different manufacturers such as Creative Labs, iRiver and Sandisk. Not all players are working yet but the author is trying hard to implement support for them in future versions.

The software requires only three steps to sync your mp3 player with iTunes. They are:

Setup a playlist in iTunes that you want to sync to your MP3 player
Configure your MP3 player in iTunes Sync by giving it a name, selecting an “identification file or folder� and selecting a playlist from iTunes
Now just click Synchronize and watch the magic happen!

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\Zune\Extensions\.avi]
“Extension.Handler”=”Microsoft.Zune.1.AVI”
“MediaType.Description”=”Video Clip”
“MediaType.Icon”=”C:\\Program Files\\Zune\\ZuneLoc.dll,-736″
“Extension.MIME”=”video/avi”
“AlreadyRegistered”=”no”
“Runtime”=dword:00000007
“PerceivedType”=”video”
“Permissions”=dword:0000000f
“UserApprovedOwning”=”no”
@=”"

Double-click the newly created file and the information that it stores will be added to your registry. You probably need to restart your computer before you can drag and drop divx movies to your Zune player.

Another method would be to rename the divx files to .wmv and add them to your Zune player. Once they appear in the library you would rename them back to .avi and sync it afterwards which should automatically convert the file and make it playable in the Zune player.

sources: Engadget and Zunescene

It offers an alternative to using playlists by making it possible to directly play the music of a special folder, this should be nice for most users who do not use customized playlists that use files from different directories. It still is able to use and create playlists of course. 1By1 is able to resume playback at a later time, a feature that is not that common in software mp3 players.

1By1 supports the usual file extensions and offers basic file editing support which includes renaming and copying files during playback. I can see some applications for this lightweight mp3 player, especially on systems that are low on resources already.

I will stick to Winamp light on my main system though because I tend to listen to internet radio a lot and 1By1 is missing that feature. Still, it is a nice player and the directory play option makes it stick out a little bit.

• support for additional sound codecs such as ogg and flac
• support for games such as Doom, Sokoban and Sudoku
• support for applications like calculators, battery related and text editors
• video support (yes even for ipod nanos 1st gen for instance)
• Gameboy emulator

Installing Rockbox is not as difficulty as it sounds. Take a look at the manual pages which contains all the information you need for all supported mp3 players. Again, you should be very careful before you proceed. Everything is explained in detail and it should not be that much of a problem to install the new firmware. The rockbox forums are also a great way to have any remaining questions answered before making the changes.

Not all podcasts are like radio shows of course, some look much more like audio lessons, like university courses without the classes. And this is what I will be talking about now. I found a great website that has three large lists of links to websites that offer podcasts that teach you something. That something is either languages, cultur or university courses. It is up to you of course to decide what you want to learn and hear, just download all the podcasts you like and transfer them to your mp3 player. All podcasts are encoded in mp3 format which makes it possible to have even large lessons take up just some megabytes.

Let us take a look at the three possibilities:

Languages: Links to podcasts that teach you 14 languages including German, French and Japanese. Most of the courses are for beginners, I suggest you read the explanation at the website that compiled the list before you download the podcasts.

University Courses: A compilation of links to colleges and universities (US) that offer free podcasts of some of their lectures. You find a wide variety of courses such as law and social sciences.

Culture: Many links to interesting podcasts and even audio texts. Concentrates on art, pop culture and media. Great.