http://www.mp3toys.net

$19.95 USD, 28 day trial available

Overview

So, MP3Toys? I know what you’re likely thinking – I’ve never heard of it. I wouldn’t blame you for that in the least – I suspect not many people have. Just in case you’re also confused about what it is, it’s an audio player for Windows. The difference between MP3Toys and other players, like iTunes, Winamp, MediaMonkey, Songbird, Media Center, aTunes, etc is that it doesn’t divert into the realm of podcasts, video, downloadable music, online radio, and so on. It tries to do one thing and do it well – play your mp3 tracks and do it attractively. For those of you wondering, yes it also plays other formats:  from their website … it “Plays MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC and M4A files”.

If you do end up buying the full version, like in many shareware programs, you get all future updates for free, but you also get a full-fledged mp3 tag editor. Not a bad deal for $20.

Features

So what makes mp3toys so great? You’ve got to be wondering this. Why do I use it instead of the above-linked programs?? Well, I have used all of the above for a time and discounted each of them for various reasons, which I will very briefly outline below. I’m not trying to flame any of those programs – they’re all very good in their own ways, but they didn’t quite work for me.

What I was looking for specifically was this:

• a music player that was lightweight on resources
• had popup tray notifications
• connected to last.fm for artist info and/or lyrics sources for song lyrics
• easy to update album art
• intuitive and easy to use

That’s the basics of it. Why I didn’t stick with the other programs?

• iTunes – simply it is WAY too heavy on resources. 85 MB when running is completely unacceptable (imo). No artist info/lyrics. Have to connect to the Apple store to get album art??? (booooo)
• Songbird – still too unpolished, slow, and like iTunes, wayyy too heavy on resources. They’re getting there though. Album art seems to be an afterthought.
• Media Monkey – just too complicated for its own good. Feature overload.
• JR Media Center – Has a case of the crashies on occasioin – too many features I don’t need or want (videos/photos). No internet connectivity.
• WinAmp – too long since an update. Needs a complete overhaul, interface-wise. They’ve been kludging addons and features into it for ages now.
• aTunes – Good, and nearly there. A few more releases and I’ll check this out again. I’ve never been fond of Java-based programs.

MP3Toys pretty much fulfills all of my wants, in one neat little package. In addition, there’s a bunch of features that it adds that I didn’t even know I wanted:

• minimize to tray
• album art tray thumbnail
• tray icon playlist navigation (on right-click context menu)
• played albums and playlist history
• auto-updating ‘popular’ albums, based on # of plays

All these features are implemented well and are polished. On top of that, when it’s minimized to the tray, as you can see, it takes between 10 and 25 MBs of memory at any given time. Not bad.

Screenshots

Screenshots are really the best way to show off this program. What it does best is not just play music, but show off your music at the same time. Album art is integrated throughout the program, so that you’re not just browsing lists of music, but mostly your album covers. This is as slick and very effective way of navigating your collection.

This is the main interface of the program. I’ve got the settings configured such that the playlist window collapses when the screen is too small to handle it as I find when both are onscreen, it’s a bit too busy. So what are we looking at here… along the bottom is the album browser, currently showing albums alphabetically. You can browse by simply using your mousewheel over this section to peruse your collection. You can also filter your collection in a variety of ways, clicking on the filters above the album art. Hovering your mouse over any one of the thumbnails in the album browser shows 2 images overlaid – one to add that album to the current (topmost) playlist in the playlist history (on the right hand side) and a button that lets you view that albums tracklist, overlaid over the album art thumbnail.

Hover over the thumbnail for about a second, and it will show you the tracklist of that album next to the currently playing album (shown in the large album art on the right – currently, Tim Easton). This also lets you see the other albums that you have of that artist, in this case, Metric. This is a nice quick way to view and browse albums by a certain artist. Notice that some albums in the browser have different icons overlaid on them as well. A heart indicates a popular album that’s been played a lot (filterable by clicking ‘Popular’ above) and an exclamation point indicates a new album (filterable by ‘New’).

Now we’re playing a playlist. On either side of the main window, you can see the History – Albums played on the left and Playlists on the right. Clicking on any one of those will bump them to be the topmost – and current – album or playlist. When you’re playing a playlist, clicking on the ‘+’ on an album (displayed on hover) will add that album to the playlist. On the left side, I’ve clicked on the lyrics button. This overlays the lyrics on the album art. The small music note icons next to the song number in a playlist indicates if lyrics are available for that track.

I’ve now clicked on ‘Artist’. This pulls info from Last.FM and compiles it nicely, including links and a photo of the artist. Right-clicking anywhere in this pane lets me select ‘Show Artist Albums’, which will immediately bring up all albums in my collection from that artist. You can also click on ‘Similar: In Collection’ to quickly filter by similar artists in your collection. In addition, you can click on ‘Similar’ anytime a song is playing to immediately filter by this – you don’t need to do it within the artist pane.

Here’s MP3Toys in my task list, using up around 15MBs. This is very typical usage stats. Sometimes it goes up to around 20MB, but this isn’t typical.

Finally, we’ve got the tray icon. You can see that the icon itself is a thumbnail of the current album playing. You can also see the partially obscured notification window. It shows the song name, the artist, the album, and a thumbnail of the album art. The context menu is self-explanatory.

A very nice feature of this tray icon is that you can quickly pause or resume your music with a single left-click of it at any time.

Conclusion

MP3Toys is a fantastic example of a single developer making a great product. Since it’s been around for a while, it’s polished and intuitive. While not for everyone (no iTunes store, no podcast support, no CD burning until ver3, etc), it is a cheap, well-designed and incredibly stable audio player.

I consider this to be one of the best programs I’ve ever spent $20 on. I use it all day, every day, both at work and home. If you’re even intrigued a little bit, I strongly urge you to download the trial and check it out.

Rating: 9.5 out of 10 stars (9.5)

Please Note…

If you’re put off by the lack of burning support, simply export your playlist to .m3u (easily done via right-click context menu) and then use MP3 CD Doctor Lite (freeware, unaffiliated with MP3Toys) to burn it. Quick and easy.

Just sayin’. Relax. It’s back up now.

Mozilla has announced plans to integrate parts of the Ubiquity add-on for Firefox into future versions of its browser.

Ubiquity, the so-called “command-line interface for the web,” allows users to create mashups and manipulate data on the fly. The experimental add-on has over two hundred thousand active users and has been downloaded by millions of Firefox users. Ubiquity’s popularity prompted Mozilla to create Taskfox which will bring some, though not all, of Ubiquity’s features into the default build of Firefox.

As powerful as Ubiquity is, it’s a bit esoteric for everyday users to grasp, since it involves typing text commands in a UNIX-like shorthand.

The idea is that the Ubiquity add-on will remain a power-user playground, but Taskfox will mine the most useful Ubiquity features and bring them to Firefox where the average user can benefit.

via Taskfox Adds Ubiquity’s Power (But Not Its Complexity) to Firefox | Epicenter from Wired.com.

I say woot.

And that’s ignoring the fact that Linux – even the much-heralded Ubuntu – is still a huge pain in the ass to work with if it doesn’t work like it should. You could say the same about Windows/Mac, but at least with those OSes, you don’t have to know how to sudo or have root access or open up a shell, etc etc. Until that entire realm within Linux is made dumb enough for Joe User, this happy Linux future is not ready for prime time.

1. The Economy. “The economic downturn is more than just marketing hype for open-source and Linux as a way to cut costs,” says Zemlin.

Right now, corporations large and small are actively consolidating IT infrastructures, Zemlin says, and free and open-source software is becoming increasingly attractive. Also, he says, a recession usually causes companies to re-think their age-old assumptions about their computing environments. They will be more likely to consider all the options when they think about software, server and workstation costs.

2. Redefinition of the Desktop. You’ve heard it so many times, it’s become a running joke: This is the year of the Linux desktop.

All kidding aside, Zemlin says, it may be time to ask, “Well, what is the desktop?”

Computing has flip-flopped in recent years — An Android phone or iPhone has roughly the same computing power as the ThinkPad notebook of five or six years ago, and today’s average netbook has several times more muscle than that old ThinkPad, yet it’s even cheaper than an iPhone.

“This is convergence — we’re seeing it really happen,” says Zemlin. In the process, the old rules about what defines a desktop are being re-written.

What is the new desktop? Is it the phone? The browser? The Kindle? The HDTV? The car? Whatever it is, Linux will play a critical role in defining the experience.

3. The Cloud. “Linux already has a vast lead in scaled virtual hosting and cost-per-CPU services,” says Zemlin. If you don’t see Linux’s advantage in web services, answer these questions: Could Google really be Google if it wasn’t for Linux? Could Google really be Google if it was running Windows?

via Three Reasons Linux Will Win in the Future – Webmonkey.

For those of us that use and love Digsby, it looks like they’ve just released a pretty big update. Things to come later this month or possibly in May, include lowering the CPU usage of Digsby (yay!) along with file transfer enhancements. Cool.

Digsby Blog » Build 51 – March Madness

We just pushed a new release (Build 51, r21152) to all users. We have gone through several alpha releases since our last major update so there are are quite a few changes. This release includes all the features, bug fixes and enhancements in Builds 46 – 51 on our Change Log.  Notable changes include:

• Added a “Local Mode” which saves all account info on your machine and uses that if Digsby is unable to connect to our servers to synchronize preferences.  Next time Digsby is able to log in, everything is synchronized.
• Fixed Hotmail message actions such as Delete and Mark as Read, which broke due to a protocol change
• Yahoo Protocol now uses their load balancers for more reliable login
• Added auto-update capability for Windows 2000 users (if you are the admin account) and fixed several bugs that prevented some users from auto-updating
• Fixed an issue that caused buddy list data (ie: merged contacts, nicknames) to not save and made preference saving more efficient
• Changed the default port for AIM and ICQ to 443 since it is more likely to succeed in many firewall situations

Hey Lifehacker, I love you. But seriously? We’re all geeks here. I’m not entirely sure we need a reminder to actually have our computers updated to the latest version of Windows with an AV running. Do we?

The first link is for AnAppaDay.com. Pretty cool idea; some guy decided to write 30 different programs in 30 different days. And he succeeded, including writing something called ‘Jedi Digg’. Nice.

But I really wanted to point you toward FreewareGenius which I love, in spite of the fact that you have to read around the advertising. They rock. If you need to find out about free replacements for some programs that you don’t feel like paying for – and don’t want to pirate, because you don’t do that, right.. right?? – they’re the place to go. I almost always end up finding something that I didn’t really even know I needed.