A Smart MP3 Player for the PC
One of the things I enjoy is playing music in the office while I work. I have a nice selection of MP3s that I have ripped from my CDs and I have them on my local hard drive here. I have been using a small and lightweight MP3 player but it has some problems - it only lets me load up one song at a time, and I have to hit play every time I want to play the song again. There is no facility for queueing more than one title and there is no repeat. In a nutshell, it is a very labor-intensive application if I want to listen to 8 hours worth of music.
I do not use Windows Media Player because it is very large, it does not repeat tracks without a significant delay, and it constantly wants to go to the internet. I have messed with WinAmp and I have played a little with LiquidAudio, and neither of these suit me. In frustration I went out to find a good MP3 player that would simply play more than one file in succession and would allow for repeats.
What I found has to be one of the most amazing MP3 players I have ever seen - Synapse, an artificially intelligent player that has exceeded my expectations.
The first time I ran Synapse, it took an outrageous amount of time to load as it indexed my MP3s and looked for any place that might have music files that it can play. I have my stuff spread out on the hard drive, so it ground away for a while until it was satisfied that it had found everything it needed. The whole process, searching a 40G hard drive, took 2-3 minutes.
Once it finished that, it had a complete library of all my goodies in a sorted list, having figured out the artist and title of each track I have on my system. Playing one of them is easy, I just double-click the track in the list and it fires up. There is a repeat function if I want to play the same track repeatedly.
Where it gets interesting, though, is in what is called "The Brain" which is somewhat like a favorites list - but not quite. I have spent a few days playing assorted tracks. So far, I have picked the tracks by hand, and I have been very happy with that. Today, I decided to do something different and I told "the brain" to select stuff for me. What Synapse has done is it has gone back through my listening history and has selected tracks from those I have listening to, and it has assembled a playlist for me in near perfect sequence, but in a different order than I have ever chosen. It is all over the map but it's not messing up.
This is a SMART player. It has clumped together songs from the same genre, it has not exceeded the number of songs in a genre that it plays beyond what I have played myself, and it fades in and out beautifully.
I tried something yesterday with it that just worked amazingly well. I went into the "console" screen and decided I wanted a playlist of nothing but a particular artist. So, I typed "play artist-name" and that's the list it gave me - all the tracks by that artist, played by default in alphabetical order (I could have asked it to shuffle and it would have done that).
Best of all? It's free!
There are some negatives to this application, though. For one, it has not been updated in almost 2 years. For another, I made an effort to contact the authors about the application and my email was returned due to a full mailbox. So, there is no support with this thing.
But that doesn't matter. It's smart enough that you likely will not need any support. Synapse is the MP3 by which all others should be judged, and I heartily recommend it.
I do not use Windows Media Player because it is very large, it does not repeat tracks without a significant delay, and it constantly wants to go to the internet. I have messed with WinAmp and I have played a little with LiquidAudio, and neither of these suit me. In frustration I went out to find a good MP3 player that would simply play more than one file in succession and would allow for repeats.
What I found has to be one of the most amazing MP3 players I have ever seen - Synapse, an artificially intelligent player that has exceeded my expectations.
The first time I ran Synapse, it took an outrageous amount of time to load as it indexed my MP3s and looked for any place that might have music files that it can play. I have my stuff spread out on the hard drive, so it ground away for a while until it was satisfied that it had found everything it needed. The whole process, searching a 40G hard drive, took 2-3 minutes.
Once it finished that, it had a complete library of all my goodies in a sorted list, having figured out the artist and title of each track I have on my system. Playing one of them is easy, I just double-click the track in the list and it fires up. There is a repeat function if I want to play the same track repeatedly.
Where it gets interesting, though, is in what is called "The Brain" which is somewhat like a favorites list - but not quite. I have spent a few days playing assorted tracks. So far, I have picked the tracks by hand, and I have been very happy with that. Today, I decided to do something different and I told "the brain" to select stuff for me. What Synapse has done is it has gone back through my listening history and has selected tracks from those I have listening to, and it has assembled a playlist for me in near perfect sequence, but in a different order than I have ever chosen. It is all over the map but it's not messing up.
This is a SMART player. It has clumped together songs from the same genre, it has not exceeded the number of songs in a genre that it plays beyond what I have played myself, and it fades in and out beautifully.
I tried something yesterday with it that just worked amazingly well. I went into the "console" screen and decided I wanted a playlist of nothing but a particular artist. So, I typed "play artist-name" and that's the list it gave me - all the tracks by that artist, played by default in alphabetical order (I could have asked it to shuffle and it would have done that).
Best of all? It's free!
There are some negatives to this application, though. For one, it has not been updated in almost 2 years. For another, I made an effort to contact the authors about the application and my email was returned due to a full mailbox. So, there is no support with this thing.
But that doesn't matter. It's smart enough that you likely will not need any support. Synapse is the MP3 by which all others should be judged, and I heartily recommend it.
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