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Synapse Media Player

Minse told me about this MP3 player software called Synapse. It uses the Windows Media Player codecs, but puts on a new, smarter front end. It has smart playlists sort of like iTunes, and will sort by artist automatically. It also automatically recognizes new songs when you rip them or download them, and they are automatically put into the playlist, like iTunes (only if you download them to a certain directory that is being watched). The Brain is also included, which learns what songs you like, and when you turn it on it will play your favorites automatically. There is also a console that understands english commands. You can type things like “Play 311” and it will find all the 311 songs in its library and start playing them. You can then say “Play Weezer after this song finishes” and when that song is done it will find all the Weezer songs and start playing them. You can tell it to do just about anything, and it will understand it and do it. It makes it much easier to play the songs you want this way. It’s much easier to type “Play MxPx”, than to open up your My Music folder, find MxPx, select all the songs you want, click play, wait for Windows Media Player to open, etc. Or have to maintain complex playlists by hand.

One thing I would like to see in the future however is a hotkey that will bring up just the console in a small window, allowing you to type commands. Kind of like in Launchbar on the Mac, which lets you press Command+Space, then a few letters to launch programs, etc. You could press Control+Space on a Windows computer with this program installed, then enter a command like “Play my 10 favorite songs” without having to click on the program and find the console, and type it in, etc.

But it should be good enough to satisfy me until I get a Mac and iTunes. :)

another thing I would like to see is that they get rid of the little tick when you click on a song and it starts playing. It’s like the song lags for a split second… and shortcut keys. We all need shortcut keys!