Jaangle Free Portable Music Player and Organizer

Jaangle (formerly Teen Spirit) is open source, free, music player and organizer software. It categorizes your mp3, ogg, wma, avi etc collection and displays it in easy to browse, user interface. It has a quality audio - video player and also an integrated tag editor.

Description

Jaangle has an intuitive and user-friendly interface for playing music, an excellent library for music managing, and very interesting download capabilities of artist photos/bios, song lyrics, etc.

You start by adding a folder which contains your music files (mp3, wma, avi, mpg etc). Jaangle scans and reads the available tag info. The artists appear in the tree like control. Each time you click on an artist all his tracks can be seen in the list pane, artist biography and image are automatically downloaded from the internet and displayed in the information pane. By double clicking a track in the list you hear the music playing. More info may appear (if available) in the info pane like lyrics or comments.

Jaangle is a Microsoft © Windows software application and it is tested in Windows XP/2003, Vista. It is certified by softpedia as 100% free of malware, including adware, spyware, viruses, trojans and backdoors.

License: Open source (GPL) free software (Freeware).

Main Features

* Media Player. Jaangle is using minimal resources (memory, CPU) for playing audio files based on the excellent bass engine. It plays video files using the DirectShow filters. By default it crossfades between tracks.

* Supported Audio Formats: mp3, mp2, wma, cda, ogg, mp1, aiff, xm, it, s3m, mod, mtm, umx, mo3, mpc, flac, mid, midi, ac3, mp4, ape, m4a and more based on directshow filters installed.

* Supported Video Formats: mpg, avi, mpeg, wmv, mp4 and more based on directshow filters installed.

* Music file tag editor (mp3, mpc, wma ...). You can tag files easily by right clicking in each track and click "properties". Alternatively you can drag-drop a track over a different artist/album/genre/year in the tree control. There are more ways to mass-tag your tracks by changing Artist / Album properties or by multiple select many tracks.

* Management. You can view your collection in various ways like Artists / Album, Year / Albums and more. Sorting is also available for every item type.

* Information downloading. By default, Jaangle, automatically downloads information from various sources in web. It is able to download information from Amazon (Album covers / Album reviews), LastFm (Artist Bio / Artist photo / Album covers), and Google (Track lyrics).

* History Logging. Jaangle automatically keeps log of the music you play. Note that it logs it only if you fully listen the track. You can see the full log of all the tracks that you have played and also track / artist statistics like top 10 per year/month etc.

* Info Display. Detailed information is displayed is the bottom right panel. It shows the artist (picture / bio) or the album (cover / review). By clicking the config button (the second icon in the title bar) you can choose to display visualizations/video or a web browser.

* Advanced Searching

* Visualization. Jaangle uses the excellent WinAmp's avs for displaying visualizations. You can add more visualization by adding visualizations scripts in the avs subdirectory.

* Game. Jaangle feature some variations of a music quiz game (it is inspired from my iPod) and the interface reminds "who wants the millionaire" TV game.The general idea is to select as quickly as possible the correct track that you listen. The games feature a total available time, a bonus in a correct answer, and a penalty in a mistaken one.
* And more…

Developers Website: http://www.jaangle.com

Direct Downloading Link (portable version): http://www.jaangle.com/files/jfiles.zip

VLC Media Player: Portable freeware playing all formats

VLC media player (VideoLAN VLC Player) is a free cross-platform media player for various audio and video formats available today. It can support streaming protocols and also can be a streaming sever with IPv6 support. As VLC comes with built-in support for most of the video and audio codec, it is able to play any format, play any codec, play any media and stream any protocol from any platform (Windows, MAC, and Linux). It is not a figure of speech; I did not have a media file that the player could not handle so far. And, you are not required to download any additional codecs on your PC. If you ever struggled with new file format, when your player refused to support, you know, what I mean.

VideoLAN started as a student project at the École Centrale Paris, with the goal of developing a general-purpose media player that could handle audio, video and streamed content. And now, its driver is accepted and one of the most successful on the market and being used by many online and offline software projects. For example, Google’s Video search uses browser plug-in based on VLC player.

Main Advantages:

• Play Anything - As said this is the main feature of this player. You can play any format or any codec. In might even read disk images (iso) and play directly.
• Simple and user-friendly GUI.
• Default interface is basic and not very appealing, but you cam choose any of the available skins to enhance its view.
• Equalizer -VLC has an equalizer for both audio and image that can significantly improve the image and audio quality.
• Filters -VLC comes in with dozens of audio and video filter that you can apply to alter the output.

A brief video tutorial on the player use:

VLC: Free DVD Player and Media Player

• Network Streaming - It can stream internet video over HTTP, UTP protocol more over it support IPv6. Ability to watch for TV and audio streams I have discovered for myself for the first time, while preparing this review. A brief video tutorial as of how to use the player for streaming:

TV and Audio Streaming using VLC Player

• You can rip DVD from inside the program. Find attached the brief tutorial on how to do with ease.

DVD Ripping with free VLC Player

• Portability - Player works with all operating system, which include Windows (including Vista), MAC, Linux, BEOS, Win CE., etc. It has a high degree of portability, and can work from a USB drive without installing on your Hard Drive.
• Ability to play partially downloaded files and even corrupted files. This way, you can test the part of the big media file before downloading it in full.
• The software is frequently updated to cover more options and optimize its performance. The latest update was at the end of February 2008.

This player is part of my USB toolbox. Highly recommended! Choose downloading 7z or zip archives to get portable version of the software.

Link for downloading from manufacturer’s site: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/