I've grown increasingly dissatisfied with most of my music players, and with the slow and buggy behavior of SC (using SC 7.3.1 currently). All of them seem to get in the way of that pure and simple process of just selecting something and playing it. Itunes is a mess, any program that alters your files or adds new ones (invisible no less) is DOA for serious music buffs. Winamp may be the best alternative, but (like Itunes) it has grown increasingly bloated with each subsequent version. And SC's web interface is just too S-L-O-W for big collections (48,000+ tracks in 3,550+ folders).
Moose filled the bill for a while, but the lack of an embedded player in Moose or SC always meant one more buggy step to deal with. By the time Moose or SC and softsqueeze or squeezeplay etc. were all up and running and paged to the CD or track I wanted to hear, minutes would have passed, along with the mood or opportunity to listen. Not to mention the hours required for a rescan every few dozen CD's. Coverjuke to the rescue! You'll find this little gem at Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/coverjuke/ It is a simple and fast XP/Vista emulation of Apple's glitzy cover flow software. It gives you instant access to all your music folders, using the folder.jpg etc. to quickly spin through your tunes. (And yes, I know about the SB Album Flow applet, but those of us living without controller units can only admire it from afar). The cover slider can be dragged by the mouse, or arrow keys etc. can be used to flip through the cover art. Find what you want give it the old double click and you're tapping your toes to the tunes. Right click and there are the filenames, you can select single tracks, even build a playlist with "Ctrl double clicks". It has a winamp plugin, or you can point the prefs in the direction of your preferred external player, but if you want simplicity the embedded player is instant and effective. Nice package, and the price is right. There are no advanced music management features, though it has a limited folder search function. There are also several nice skins available - I like the black Vista skin myself... So how do you get it to work with your SB? Install the WaveInput plugin, and go to the entry in your Favorites. (waveinput is the last alpha entry in my favorites list so it's easy to get to by scrolling up instead of down.) Now the SB is receiving the sound card output and whatever you hear on the PC (for better or worse) is piped through the SB (no way to synch, of course, and no track info on the display, which I assume is due to using the plugin). Find the SC plugin and setup info at: http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/WaveInput_plugin It takes a minute to initially load Coverjuke or to rescan for a big collection, but it's WAY faster than SC or even Moose, and once it's up you can hop around your collection at the speed of light. Try it! -- Fleury ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fleury's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9783 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=74225 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
