Default aTunes Setup
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View Full SizeI am amazed that the aTunes audio player (no affiliation with iTunes) managed to fly underneath my radar for so long. I have tested out a countless number of different media players over the years, and rarely have I encountered programs that have impressed me as much as this one shortly after installing it. After testing it out I felt it was necessary to write an unbiased review to inform more people of this great alternative to the more recognizable media players being used by the majority of people.
aTunes is a full-featured audio player and manager, developed in the Java programming language. It can run on different platforms including Windows, Mac, Linux and Sun Solaris. It current plays mp3, ogg, wma, wav, flac, mp4 and radio streams. aTunes also functions as a music manager allowing users to easily edit tags, organize music and rip CDs.
The aTunes installation went as smooth as could be expected. I had it up and running in minutes shortly after installing it on my ancient 7 year system. There were no attempts to install any type of toolbar or other third party software. Installation was a breeze. aTunes simply prompts the user to make a few necessary choices, such as the installation path and start menu folder, and then installs in seconds. The good news is that aTunes is platform independent, so there are versions available for Mac, Linux and Solaris users also.
Upon running aTunes the first time, the user is prompted to select the location of their music collection, after which the selected folder is scanned for media. It took a little less than 15 minutes for aTunes to scan my main music folder, which contains over 14,000 songs. I can't compare make a comparison to other media players in terms of the speed of this process, as this was the first time I made it a point to record such info, but it didn't seem to take an unnecessary amount of time.
aTunes true strength lies in it's features.There are few media players that can compete with aTunes in terms of features straight out of the box, without having to install plugins to achieve the same effect.
The features that I was most impressed by were option to embed controls for the player in the system tray, the similar artists module (fetches similar artists from last.fm based on the track you are currently listening to), the recommended YouTube videos module, karaoke mode, tabbed playlists, built in last.fm integration, cover navigator, and radio and podcast support. Here are a few other features currently available in aTunes:
Player:
Tags:
Navigator:
Playlist
Favorites:
Internet:
Podcasts:
Audio CD:
Statistics:
GUI:
The biggest downside to aTunes would undoubtedly be it's speed, although I still think that the sheer number of features more than makes up for this weak spot. Unfortunately, aTunes runs on the sluggish Java runtime environment, which most users will already have installed on their system. While I wouldn't consider aTunes to be unbearably slow, I did notice that it wasn't as responsive as the more streamlined players out there. If you're looking for a minimalistic and speedy media player, that is extremely light on system resources then I suggest you try other media players such as foobar, xmplay, or 1by1. However, if you're looking for a media player with power that gives you a number of methods for exploring your music, as well as discovering new music, then aTunes is worth checking into.
It is possible to disable a number of window elements if you are the type that prefers a minimalistic appearance (See screenshot below); however, aTunes is still going to use more memory than a player such as foobar regardless of the number of window elements that you choose to display.
Basic Info:
aTunes is a full-featured audio player and manager, developed in the Java programming language. It can run on different platforms including Windows, Mac, Linux and Sun Solaris. It current plays mp3, ogg, wma, wav, flac, mp4 and radio streams. aTunes also functions as a music manager allowing users to easily edit tags, organize music and rip CDs.
Installation:
The aTunes installation went as smooth as could be expected. I had it up and running in minutes shortly after installing it on my ancient 7 year system. There were no attempts to install any type of toolbar or other third party software. Installation was a breeze. aTunes simply prompts the user to make a few necessary choices, such as the installation path and start menu folder, and then installs in seconds. The good news is that aTunes is platform independent, so there are versions available for Mac, Linux and Solaris users also.
Startup:
Upon running aTunes the first time, the user is prompted to select the location of their music collection, after which the selected folder is scanned for media. It took a little less than 15 minutes for aTunes to scan my main music folder, which contains over 14,000 songs. I can't compare make a comparison to other media players in terms of the speed of this process, as this was the first time I made it a point to record such info, but it didn't seem to take an unnecessary amount of time.
Features:
aTunes true strength lies in it's features.There are few media players that can compete with aTunes in terms of features straight out of the box, without having to install plugins to achieve the same effect.
The features that I was most impressed by were option to embed controls for the player in the system tray, the similar artists module (fetches similar artists from last.fm based on the track you are currently listening to), the recommended YouTube videos module, karaoke mode, tabbed playlists, built in last.fm integration, cover navigator, and radio and podcast support. Here are a few other features currently available in aTunes:
Player:
- Supported formats: mp3, ogg, wma, wav, flac, mp4, m4a, ra, rm, cue
- Online radio supported
- Player engine: mplayer for all environments, xine for Linux systems
- Volume control, mute function
- Karaoke function
- Equalizer
- Normalization
- Shuffle and repeat options
- OSD (On-screen display)
Tags:
- Reads mp3, ogg, flac, wma, mp4, ra, rm tags
- Writes mp3, ogg, flac, wma, mp4 tags
- Reads and shows pictures included in ID3v2 tags
- Tag editor window
- Auto tag edition tools: set track number, genre, lyrics and so on automatically
- Some auto tag tools for all repository
- Extended search function
- Support for 18 different languages
Navigator:
- Allows users to view music categorized by artist, album or genre in a hierarchy tree, or by folders
- Fast access to songs and albums
- Filter option to find easily artists, albums or genres
- Cover Navigator
Playlist
- Support for huge playlist, with thousand of songs
- Support for multiple playlists at the same time
- Shows multiple columns: title, artist, album, genre, length, track number…
- Can be sorted by any of the columns
- Columns can be hidden for simplicity
- Support for open or save m3u playlists
- Full Drag-and-Drop support. Songs can be dragged from the navigator or from the OS file system
- Can be filtered
- Device view
- Connect your portable player or anything that could be mounted as a file system, and view in aTunes, copy to repository, synchronize, etc.
Favorites:
- Songs, albums or artists can be selected as favorites
- Favorite elements are shown in the “Favorites” tab in Navigator
Internet:
- Artist search tool in different web pages: YouTube, Google Video , Wikipedia, etc.
- Last.fm information: when a song is being played, album information, artist albums and similar artists are shown
- Last.fm profile update: songs played are submitted to your Last.fm profile
- Lyrics information: when a song is being played, automatically aTunes shows lyrics
- Related videos at YouTube
Podcasts:
- Subscribe your favorite podcast feeds and listen them in aTunes
- Download podcast feed entries to your hard disk
Audio CD:
- aTunes includes a cd ripper tool, using cdda2wav, lame, flac and oggenc. Just put an audio cd into your computer, and select “Import CD” in the “Tools” menu. You can select which tracks to rip, and get track names automatically from Amazon.
- Support for optional Nero AAC encoder. See Adding the Nero AAC encoder
- Support for optional FAAC encoder (except Windows OS)
- Support for CDParanoia on Mac OS X and Linux (limited functionality)
Statistics:
- Songs played, songs never played
- Songs most played
- Album most played
- Artist most played
- Last date of play
GUI:
- Standard view with all controls and features
- Multi window view. Every window element (navigator, playlist, context information) is shown as a separate window. Every window can be located and / or arranged as you want.
- System tray icon to control player
- Themes support: you can change aTunes colors by changing theme
- Full Screen Mode
Performance:
The biggest downside to aTunes would undoubtedly be it's speed, although I still think that the sheer number of features more than makes up for this weak spot. Unfortunately, aTunes runs on the sluggish Java runtime environment, which most users will already have installed on their system. While I wouldn't consider aTunes to be unbearably slow, I did notice that it wasn't as responsive as the more streamlined players out there. If you're looking for a minimalistic and speedy media player, that is extremely light on system resources then I suggest you try other media players such as foobar, xmplay, or 1by1. However, if you're looking for a media player with power that gives you a number of methods for exploring your music, as well as discovering new music, then aTunes is worth checking into.
It is possible to disable a number of window elements if you are the type that prefers a minimalistic appearance (See screenshot below); however, aTunes is still going to use more memory than a player such as foobar regardless of the number of window elements that you choose to display.
Conclusion:
Most programs that I test out on my computer are uninstalled shortly afterwards. Despite it's shortcomings in terms of speed, I decided to keep aTunes installed on my system to see how it grows on me, and I will continue to closely monitor it's development. I hope that they will eventually decide to stray from programming in Java and go open source with their code, but I'm not going to hold my breath as this would require the developers to completely rewrite the code from the ground up. There are a number of standard features that appear to be missing such as visualizations, skins (various color themes are available) and plugin support. Although I don't own an iPod, it would also be nice to see the limited iPod support improved upon. This would do a great deal to convince more people to make this their default player of choice. This player is still in it's infacy though, having only recently released the version one milestone, so their is a lot of time to expand on the ideas already present. Hopefully these features will be present in future releases. While in the longrun aTunes might not dethrone Winamp as my overall media player of choice, or MediaMonkey as my preferred music manager and tagger, it is still a very robust player that I would recommend at least giving a try
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