5 music-focused iTunes alternatives for Mac

Alex Layne — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:57:56 +0000

iTunes has become more and more of a processor hog over the years as it has grown to handle more features. While it’s great for syncing your iOS devices or buying songs, it’s not exactly the most nimble music player anymore. Below are five alternatives that focus on the music, without the bloat.

Ecoute

Ecoute (French for “listen”) is aimed at being a minimalistic standalone player that syncs with iTunes. It’s been around the longest of the players listed here, having recently reached version 3.

The best way to describe how Ecoute looks is to imagine what the iPhone’s music app would like if it were ported to OS X. Navigation is done through lists, with album art on the left side to make it easier to distinguish between entries. There’s a breadcrumb navigation bar at the top, so it’s easy to get around.

Ecoute has a lot of nice touches. The Dock icon displays the currently playing album artwork, global keyboard shortcuts allow you to control playback in the background, and the controller (which can be customized with available themes) can display the current album artwork on the desktop. You can also share the current track on Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm.

Ecoute is available in the Mac App Store for $8.

Enqueue

Enqueue’s name comes from one of its main features: a queue in the sidebar that acts as a temporary playlist. You can drag songs and albums into the queue and listen to them in order, making it easier to plan and enjoy long listening sessions. Enqueue also has a mini player view available that just shows the queue alongside controls. Being able to see the queue makes it a lot more useful than iTunes’ mini player.

The rest of Enqueue’s interface is more traditional than the others in this list, but that doesn’t make it less useful. There are four tabs at the top for your library, playlists, history, and preferences. The library tab adopts a staid browser layout, with filter columns at the top and results below. I don’t much care for this configuration, so I was happy to see I could change it in the view menu to display just a list of artists on the left and results on the right.

The history tab displays your most played artists or songs and how they relate to each other using a bar graph, which is unique among the apps in this list. Further features include iTunes sync, Last.fm scrobbing, and configurable global shortcut keys.

Enqueue is available in the Mac App Store for $10.

Sonora

Sonora (Spanish for “sound”) has a straightforward interface with a lot of power buried beneath. The toolbar houses the controls for play, pause, shuffle and the like. The middle of the toolbar is occupied by the queue, an area where you can drag albums or songs from different artists to make a temporary playlist, similar to Enqueue’s. By default, the queue will be populated by songs from the currently playing album, which makes it easy to skip to a different song while browsing music as well. A sidebar along the left lists all artists, and the main browser shows album artwork arranged alphabetically by artist, like iTunes.

The most interesting feature of Sonora is the ability to type anywhere in the app to bring up a search box, which works a little like Alfred. Type the name of an album, hit enter, and it starts playing. It’s slick, but hard to discover initially.

Unlike the other apps listed, Sonora is still in beta, so be warned you might run into a bug or two. It’s available from the developer’s website for free for the time being.

Rdio

Rdio is unique among this group in that it streams music rather than playing downloaded files. This allows for a much broader selection of music, as anything in Rdio’s vast catalogue is available to stream. Instant access to new releases and recommendations is also a plus for Rdio. The downsides, of course, are the requirement of a network connection and the lack of more obscure artists.

The Rdio app itself is basically a wrapper around a web app, though most people wouldn’t notice. The load times are fast; I’ve never had to wait long for a song to buffer, and the UI loads quickly as well.

Rdio also has social features built-in. Other users can follow you and see what you’re listening to, and you can share your activity to Facebook, Last.fm, and Twitter.

Rdio is available for free, with a variable song cap (basically, the more you use the service, the lower the cap becomes). Unlimited desktop and web access is $5 a month, and unlimited web and mobile access costs $10/month.

Note: A competitor to Rdio, Spotify, is also quite popular. The reason I’m not covering it fully is because I think the Rdio app is better, though it still deserves a mention.

Vox

Vox is different from the other apps mentioned. Instead of choosing music from within the app, you choose it from the Finder. This behavior goes back to the early days of music players, when you chose music from the file manager instead of within the app itself.

The UI consists of several palettes rather than one unified window. The palettes can be hidden or shown with simple Cmd-number shortcuts, i.e. Cmd-1 to bring up the player, Cmd-2 to bring up the equalizer. The advantage of this kind of design is that it’s easy to show and hide what’s necessary. Of course, the downside is that it’s a little harder to use.

Vox has a large list of supported file types, including FLAC, OGG Vorbis, and Apple Lossless. There’s also an export feature, which can convert every file type it supports into a good selection of formats, including AAC and WAV. It can even apply effects to the exported version.

There’s also a menu bar entry for Vox, which lets you easily pause, skip, and choose a new song. Vox is available at the developer’s website for free.

Are you sticking to iTunes for listening to music, or have you switched to a different app to fulfill that need? Let us know about your favorite in the comments.

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Exclusive: Sonic Vox From Smule – Unleash the Voices in Your iPhone

Nick Santilli — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:00:43 +0000

Sonic Vox, by Smule

New this very day, Smule releases their latest audio based iPhone application, Sonic Vox. With Sonic Vox, simply slide your finger across your iPhone and slip through a range of voices from Darth Vader to Gollum.

Perhaps it’s easiest to think of Sonic Vox as Voice Candy for your iPhone. So the most obvious question that came to mind for me was, “Can I talk to other people over my iPhone as Vader or Gollum?” Based on the current constraints of the iPhone SDK, this capability unfortunately is not allowed. But as I get into the finer points of Sonic Vox below, you’ll see that it is possible to talk in these modulated voices via iChat or Skype — using your iPhone!

The visual feedback to Sonic Vox is minimal, and reminds me of the pulsing strobe from the hood of KITT (if I must explain myself, that’s the car from Knight Rider). But the point isn’t the visual, as with all Smule apps to date (and in the future…), it’s all about the audio. When you speak into your phone with Sonic Vox running, the playback can be heard from the iPhone’s earpiece speaker. (Admittedly, this was only interesting to me for the initial testing of the application. However, if you’re my boys who are Star Wars junkies, the iPhone battery will die long before they get tired of listening to their own Darth Vader voices.) If you’re interested in greater fidelity, however — or to share with a friend — you can plug in your head phones and listen. Upping the ante a bit more, connect your iPhone to an external amplifier via the headphone jack to a line-in on say, your MacBook.

Has that light bulb gone off yet? Smule actually turns the iPhone — with the help of Sonic Vox – into a functional external microphone for your computer! There are two great benefits to this capability. On the one hand, you can play your wicked cool voices for others to hear and enjoy more easily. On the other hand, now you’re able to use your iPhone and Sonic Vox as a line-in source for the likes of Skype, or iChat. Go ahead and totally wig out your parents/children/siblings/what-have-you when you begin audio chatting as Gollum!

So really, what Sonic Vox does is cool, but somewhat limited in application. How it accomplishes this functionality, however, is what really makes Smule’s newest application a killer piece of tech. Truth be told, Sonic Vox is creating real time voice effects. To be clear on this point — it is not recording your input, altering it, and playing it back to you. Rather, as you are speaking into your iPhone’s mic, Sonic Vox is using Digital Signal Processing (DSP) in real time to alter the resulting, simultaneous output. (If you really want to geek out, look into Smule Co Founder, Dr. Ge Wang’s Chuck audio programming language project.)

Maybe it takes an audio geek (or perhaps, just a geek in general) to get psyched about the potential Smule brings to the table with Sonic Vox. But what these guys — and girl — are doing is truly awesome. Look for another Developer Profile in the coming week, all about Smule. After chatting with Co-Founder Jeff Smith yesterday, I think I’m nearly as excited about what they’re doing as they are, and I can’t wait to share more with all of you. For now it’s safe to say you haven’t seen anything yet.

If you’d like to get the first hand experience using Sonic Vox (and what is likely the future of real time audio processing on the iPhone), it’s priced at $.99 in the App Store. What have you got to lose with awesome Smule’s money back guarantee?