Filed under: Audio, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware, Open Source
aTunes: Cross platform, open source media player
by Brad Linder Jun 23rd 2008 at 9:00AM
The program has all the features you'd expect from a modern media player, including the ability to play MP3, ogg, WMA, WAV, FLAC, MP4, RA, and RM files. You can also listen to internet radio streams. There's no support for DRM though, so if you've got restricted music files on your desktop, this might not be the player for you.
One of the niftiest features in aTunes is Last.fm integration. While you can't use the software to play music from Last.fm, you can sign into your account and submit your played song list to Last.fm. aTunes also takes advantage of Last.fm's audioscrobbling service, which means you can see a list of artists that are similar to the one you're listening to in real-time. When available, aTunes will also automatically display album art and song lyrics.
Update: It appears the web site is down, but you can still download aTunes from SourceForge.
There are far too many features to list them all, but here are a few of the cooler ones:
- Karaoke function (which cuts the frequencies typically used by the human voice and lets you sing along at the top of your lungs)
- Tag editor window
- Drag and drop support (drag files from your file system into the player)
- Support for portable devices that can be mounted as a file system
- Search for artists on YouTube, Google Video, Wikipedia
- Subscribe to podcasts
- Built-in CD ripper
- Tracks statistics such as songs played, not played, songs, artists, and albums most played, and last date
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Abdo said 9:12AM on 6-23-2008
Those are some nice features.
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Andrew Adams said 10:01AM on 6-23-2008
hm. wonder how this compares to mediamonkey?
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Andrew Adams said 10:00AM on 6-23-2008
hm. wonder how this compares to mediamonkey?
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Folst said 10:46AM on 6-23-2008
i read until ... "and is built on Java"
NEXT!
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Shashank said 11:08AM on 6-23-2008
better than mediamonkey
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Mimzy said 11:10AM on 6-23-2008
This sounds cool, but since I don't particularly enjoy karaoke, there doesn't seem to be a reason to switch from Amarok...
Windows users, however, might think differently.
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RED_404 said 9:44PM on 6-23-2008
Ok other than the Java and the 60mb footprint
I like the interface ++ for the dark theme
great codec support thanks to "mplayer"
but best of all the one-click & extremely fast uninstaller
I wish more programs had an uninstaller like that :-)
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John said 10:36PM on 6-23-2008
Bugy! Can't select folders from My Computer
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Michael said 11:20PM on 6-23-2008
No mention of Songbird?
http://getsongbird.com/
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JollyBengali said 11:22PM on 6-23-2008
I have been searching for an alternative to iTunes on Mac for awhile. This does NOT seem to the one.
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Holmess said 10:09AM on 6-25-2008
Not sure about the phrase "Amarok Killer". I myself don't use amarok, i use media player daemon, but the capabilities of Amarok are not so easy to be imported to other platforms. Anyways i appreciate your candid proposal to use the program but i still doubt the potential to be an Amarok replacement. Anyways thanks.
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Holmess said 10:13AM on 6-25-2008
"Amarok Killer" a little extreme, Amarok's ability to organize to handle humongous databases is almost unparalleled, but can be imitated. The following that Amarok got in the posix community should be linked to extremely self respecting posix users. Nonetheless thanks for the post, like always another good find on DldSqd.
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headphonist said 2:56AM on 6-29-2008
Hey, the site seems to be down due to too much traffic, anyone got a mirror for the download?
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Bill said 3:01AM on 6-29-2008
JAVA? No, thanks. Also, it's not a good sign when one tries to goto the URL for a product and it just brings up a placeholder.
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Brad Linder said 3:07AM on 6-29-2008
You can download aTunes directly from Sourceforge.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/atunes/
I'm not sure what happened to the product page, but the media player's been getting a lot of attention lately and its possible the site's bandwidth has been exceeded.