Jazz Odyssey

Itunes is a great piece of software. It’s easy to use and it works well.  For most people, its the only music player and organizer you’ll ever need.  However…if you are a more advanced user and looking for more flexibility, you owe it to yourself to check out Anapod by Red Chair Software.   Anapod integrates with Windows Explorer so quickly sending a song, file or playlist to your Ipod is done with a simple right-click.  It supports all the Itunes music features like Play Counts and Volume Adjustments.  A cool feature is that it can alter bitrates on-the-fly during transfers to your Ipod, so if you want high quality MP3s to play at home but are willing to sacrifice sonic fidelity for file size when going portable, it will downsample your higher quality MP3s during the transfer to your Ipod.  Very nifty.  It also has support for plugins to transcode to/from different formats, including FLAC, Ogg Vorbis and WMA. 

My favorite feature is the Anapod Xtreamer that turns your machine into a web server that can stream your music collection to any other machine on your home network, or to any computer on the Internet with remote access security including user/password database and HTTP authentication.  It’s simple to set up and it works beautifully.  Those of you who are happy with Itunes but think this feature is a cool edition can purchase the Xtreamer under the name Audigen as a stand-alone application.

Finally, it also has an embedded SQL database engine…any programmers out there have a desire to write a plug-in that taps it to add a "now playing" .sig to Wordpress, Typepad or other blogging software?