Tuesday, March 23, 2010

For those who like to play....

This is a very new media player called MusicBee. It promises so many things that it all sounds too good to be true, but I've been using it for 2 days now and so far it's kept its promises.

If you are looking for an application geared toward managing extensive music collections, easy to use and with a comprehensive feature set - MusicBee is that application. MusicBee makes it easy to organize, find and play music files on your computer, on portable devices and on the web.

The screenshot above is Shane's spillpost. When you load any web page, a list of song files on the page is generated and you can listen to them as you read, download and/or add them to your library - all at the same time. There's also a lyrics/song info box. You can see the whole width of the web page - I just collapsed it in a bit for the photo size

Plays all formats, converts between formats, and if you search for a song you don't have, it will supposedly (haven't checked this yet) look for it on last.fm and play it from there for you.

It isn't the fastest player to load, but its faster to use than other players with browsers built in. It says it can sync with all sorts of portable media players and allows drag and drop updating, but I haven't had the courage to plug in my iPod yet.

I'm not endorsing this as something to switch to. Early days yet. But the guy doing it has been very responsive to suggestions, and if you want to be the coolest kid in your class, I'd check it out. (For those who follow these things, the long-promised songbird is emerging ... from someone else)

14 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
tincanman said...

yup
But it is only for PC so far

B-Mac said...

Does it scrobble?

B-Mac said...

soz, used the wrong account there Tinny!

tincanman said...

People will figure it out.
Probably.
Or not

DR said...

I recently started using Media Monkey after using Win Amp for a long time cos I wanted a nice big pic of an album when I'm playing it, but it seems as tricky as Windows Media Player when playing anything other than an mp3 file. So I might give this one a go, but the design looks a little bit busy so I might go back to Win Amp, but what about my nice album picture? I just don't know, so many slightly disappointing options. As for finding a player that can display all the albums I've got in one handy window this seems to be the stuff of a mad man's dream, and leaves me to scroll through uninspiring windows folders for ever.

tincanman said...

Have you tried foobar DR? You can customize it to anything you want. Takes a bit of fiddling, but there's no shortage of help forums

lambretinha said...

@DR: You've probably tried this out, but maybe the solution for your problem is simpler than you think. What WinAmp skin are you using? From what I'm gathering, WinAmp's Bento skin is pretty close to what you're looking for.

tincanman said...

Haven't tried this, but I just read that you can add spotify search so you can find and play an artist or song without leaving MusicBee

http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=914.0

Unknown said...

it has integrated last.fm scrobbling and also last.fm and other internet radio stations support

crvnts said...

Hi, its true that you can add spotify search, you can search and find musica, songs and artist without leaving musicbee, but you cant play from it, when you click on a result it opens automatically spotify to the artist/song/album you clicked, like firefox or songbird.

tincanman said...

thanks!

DR said...

Thanks for the tip tincanman, I shall investigate.

lambretinha - you may well have a point, I might have another go with it. So many options so little time.

tincanman said...

Wow!
Opened DR's post in MusicBee and with one click I had downloaded all 26 songs. Took a couple minutes, no more.