Thursday, June 24, 2010

Program Review: aTunes

Yes, that's right, aTunes.
It's an open source music player.
And it is really quite good.
I recently got annoyed by iTunes, and decided to look into finding something else to use. This search brought me through many different players, but aTunes stuck out to me. Mostly because it's quite awesome. The interface has a bit of a learning curve, and is not as user friendly as iTunes, but it has some very nice features.

The Good:

First off: It looks really nice. I've never been a fan of the iTunes look. It seemed to clash with everything on my computer. aTunes has a customizable look. Which is a nice bonus.

The thing that got me really into aTunes, was its ability to work with Last.fm. Sure, I can have it sign in, and record my listens to my Last.Fm account, however, It also gives me information, lyrics, album art, popular youtube videos, discography.... etc. All loaded from Last.fm.

The interface is cusomizable as well. So if you tweak it enough, you should be able to get it up for however you want to use it.

It gives you statistics that you can't get in iTunes. Specifically information such as, most listened to ARTIST, and Albums, etc.

The Bad:

Steep learning curve.

Some file formats can have issues with tagging (Artist info and such)

No Visualizer.

All in all, I'd rate it 9.5 on a 1-10 scale.
It does what it does perfectly, with only a couple little things keeping it away from perfect.

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