You can also post a message about the track now playing to your Twitter feed or Facebook status. ![]() In the bottom-left corner of the Ecoute window is a button that lets you send Last.fm a list of the tracks you've listened to in the past two hours. You can deactivate left or right swipes to move to the next or previous track, and switch the program to left-handed mode. Other options let you change the player view to show the player when a track is selected or when the app detects inactivity. Open the device's Settings and choose Ecoute to activate shake to shuffle and to choose a shuffle behavior. Ecoute works with Siri as well: when the app is active, say "play" and the name of the song to start playback in Ecoute. When you're listening to audio in Ecoute, double-tapping the iPhone button shows the playback controls on the lock screen just as when using the device's built-in music app. Both apps give you the option to shuffle the album tracks. On the iPhone the track list slides over the album list. For example, when you select an album in Ecoute, the cuts appear in a pop-up window. Other differences between the two apps are more subtle. With the exception of small thumbnails in the Album view, the iPhone's lists are text-only, but Ecoute shows each entry's cover art when it's available. The big difference between the two apps is the appearance of their lists. Ecoute's iPhone app has a Podcasts button and a Search box that slides in and out of view. The iPhone player lets you swap out one of these options for Compilations, Composers, or Genres. (As noted above, the iOS version of Ecoute costs $2.99.) Both Ecoute and the iPhone's built-in music player give you the same basic view options: Artists, Albums, Songs, Playlists. Similar to MediaMonkey's taskbar playback controls, Ecoute shrinks to a thumbnail on the desktop with tiny buttons for stop/play, forward, and reverse.Įcoute really shines on the iPhone. When I tested Ecoute I sometimes had to switch between views to have the vertical scroll bar appear in the two windows. Select a playlist on the left side of the window to view its contents on the right side. Unlike MediaMonkey, Ecoute displays your iTunes playlists. With the exception of the small thumbnails in Albums view, the iPhone's built-in music player is a text-only affair. The current track's progress is shown at the top of the window, and playback controls are in a row at the bottom. You navigate your library via a single drop-down menu in the top-right corner. (You can resize the window all the way to full screen, but you really don't need to.) Where MediaMonkey throws eight categories of information at you in one big window, Ecoute comfortably squeezes your iTunes library into an unobtrusive box listing only a handful of items at a time. The Gold version of MediaMonkey costs $25 for a version 4.x license and $50 for a lifetime license (which begs the question, whose lifetime?) Gold features include support for multiple music collections, automatic file organization, automatic playlists, and "professional-quality" CD ripping.Įcoute outshines the iPhone's music player I didn't test MediaMonkey's CD burning or on-the-fly volume leveling, nor did I use the app to sync with an iPod or iPhone.) (Note that my testing was limited to audio playback and file management. ![]() ![]() My favorite MediaMonkey feature is the small playback controller that pops open when you hover over the program's icon in the Windows task bar.Īfter switching between iTunes and MediaMonkey for a couple of days, I came to appreciate some things about both programs. The iTunes library on the PC has 5,191 files and just over 26GB of total storage (note that both libraries include many duplicate titles - not MediaMonkey's fault). MediaMonkey's scan of my system discovered 5,074 files using a total of about 25GB of storage. MediaMonkey's multipane window sorts your library content and puts playback controls in a row at the bottom of the screen.
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