5 Kick Ass iTunes Alternatives

I’ve had enough with iTunes its slow, has a massive memory footprint, and half of it is a store which I don’t really use. So here are five alternate ways to laden your sexy iPod.

Songbird is an open-source customizable music player. It's built off of the Mozilla API and combines the web and music management in one, and is a great way to find new music. Supports importing media, formats supported MP3, FLAC, Vorbis on all platforms; WMA, WMA DRM on Windows;AAC and Fairplay on Windows and Mac. Is crossplatform, Support dor 25 languages, Browser, Library Management, Custom UI, has support for all the iPods except the Touch .. bummer. In short lots of stuff but no iPod Touch !!

LINK

foobar2000 is yet another advanced freeware audio player but just for the Windows platform.Its free, supports gapless playback, customizable keyboard shortcuts, secure CD ripping, streaming support, a lot of audio formats(details)

LINK

This thing is still around? Yea, the granddaddy of Windows music players is still alive and kicking, Winamp will still get the job done. The Full version (which is free) and the Pro version both include integrated iPod support and all version will playback iTunes protected files, again, as long as QuickTime is installed.

LINK

 

Its all rings and bells, manage your music with playlists, Support for MP3, AAC (M4A), OGG, WMA, FLAC, MPC, WAV, CDA, M3U, PLS, etc.Sync with iPhones, iPods, and most any MP3 phone or Audio Device, Record & Convert, Tags, Burning, Subscribing to podcasts, Customizable Skins.

LINK

This one is the simplest of them all. No music playback, no playlists nothing. Just a simple, quick and reliable application to load your iPod with some music.

Currently in its alpha stage it doesn't support Photos, Video.

 

 

LINK

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Publish any File as a Public Web Site in Seconds

A free no frills service to publish any file as public site. Every converted file to a web page has a unique web address so you can share it with friends, or other people on the internet. This allows information to be shared quickly and efficiently to a large audience.

Pros

• No download limits
• No CAPTCHA codes
• Multiple simultaneous downloads and uploads
• Unlimited page bandwidth
• No sign up required
• No software to install
• Link directly to the generated web page

Cons

• File2.ws is NOT a place for permanent data storage or backups, any file may be deleted with or without warning.
• File2.ws is designed to host files which receive lots of hits, if your file does not receive lots of hits then it will be automatically deleted.
• You can not upload a file more than 15 MB at once.

Link

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A ‘Wow Dats Cool’ RSS Reader

All of us have seen a news  ticker or a stock ticker, now how about a ticker that displays random stories from a list of RSS feeds you tell it to track, that means practically low maintenance  personalized news source and that too done so neatly.

Meet snackr, it's an RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop. When you see a title that looks interesting, you can click on it to pop up the item in a window. 

 

Requirements : Adobe Air 

Download

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Spending Too Much Time on Twitter .. err This Should Rescue You

I’m always looking for better ways to organize my life which translates to spending less time organizing and more time doing. There’s so much of Getting Things Done stuff out there. But at the end of the day who’ll tell you that you’ve been too busy socializing on facebook or tweeting the trending topics. Well here’s a solution.

ManicTime automatically collects data on your computer usage. It records active and away time, as well as which applications you used and for how long you used them. All the activity information is logged in a local database so that the privacy is not compromised.

Simple Graphic Presentation Of Your Daily Activities

Accurate And Efficient Way To Tag Time

Find Out How Much Time You Spend On Different Tasks

here’s a screenshot

Link

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Gmail Mobile on Steroids

Today Google announced two improvements for Gmail for mobile. These improvements are for iPhone/iPod Touch OS 2.2.1 or above, as well as all Android-powered devices, and is available for US English only.

The first improvement is faster address auto-completion. Google speed’s up the process by reusing previously fetched matches in subsequent searches.

Another improvement is the Keyboard Shortcuts. Complete list of the keyboard shortcuts can be seen here.

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A No Nonsense Productivity Tool

The single most important task in increasing your productivity is to get the things bogging you down on a to doo list. There area numerous ways/applications to do that. But Doomi as one app that does all the work sans any bells and whistles.

It is an Adobe Air app so it runs on Windows Mac OSX and Linux. It  just stays out of our way and out of your browser. It has all the basic features one uses, and none of the ones you don’t. Create, edit, set reminders, and keep archives of your old tasks. It can’t get simpler than this.

Though I’ll appreciate if they come out with an iPhone app.

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5 Most Popular Uses of Twitter. And How Can These Affect its Monetization Strategy.

Over the past year Twitter has been the media favorite, primarily because of two reasons

• Explosive consistent growth
• Speculations about its revenue model(if any?)

Apart from these factors. Celebs like Barack Obama to Britney Spears, and now Oprah have fueled the growth. But Twitter being a business what matters at the end of the day is how people use its services, whether as a medium for conversation, following the topics of there interest, or to search for information.

Uses ?

Micro Blogging Platform. The intended use by its co-founders(also the people behind the popular Blogger platform). A lot of bloggers use twitter as a medium to publish feed to their original blogs. Or tweeting about other people’s posts relevant to their niche. But the original idea of micro blogging is practiced when one tweets about a certain event happing in real-time.    

Affect: In such a scenario people will continue flocking Twitter to find interesting and more importantly new stuff to surf. Also how many people have twittered(retweet) about certain content can certify its credibility.

Conversation Platform (micro brainstorming). People reply to their friend’s tweet and thus starting a conversation. This in itself has a very less potential however if somehow tweets result in brief brainstorming sessions then they might be of interest.

Affect:   Much like other social networks, if twitter gets adopted as a mean of chit-chat will make it difficult to be monetized.

Life Streaming. Here what I mean by ‘Life Streaming’ is tweeting about things a person is doing/thinking. Much like the way facebook’s status updates.

Affect: There are currently three major monetization strategies being speculated

1. Advertising
2. Charging for Premium Accounts
3. Charging for API access.

If twitter is majorly used as a life streaming service, then going by the trend options 1&2 do not apply. However people will still be using the service for purposes like keeping a check on what there fav celebs, friends, parents or in some cases Pets, Homes, Refrigerates are up to. And as the current stats show majority of twitters use Apps instead of the original web version, so only option left would be to charge for API access, but then the app developers must also have a mean of earning, which is remote.

Customer Care | Public Address System. Using Twitter as a communication platform to have a one-on-one  touch with their customers, or use by politicians, media, celebs  etc to reach out the audiences.

Affect:  Use of Twitter as the new age Radio will result in a cliché business model of charging the twitters(i.e the speakers). However chances of this being a reality are bleak.

Search. Twitter as a search engine. This is a dependable use(on the above four uses). Provided Twitter continues to capture any of the above activity in considerable numbers. It can certainly be a good business sin one way or another. Here’s how.

Affect: From users searching for news, to brands monitoring the conversations to collect feedback, or people finding other people(read twitters) of similar interests. All this can be easily monetized.    

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