Most people who have an iPhone or iPod sync it in iTunes. But what if you don’t want to use iTunes to listen to your music while you are using your computer? Ecoute, is the perfect application for this. Ecoute is a small app to browse and play music and videos in your iTunes library. You can browse artists, playlists, and much more and you can even play TV shows and movies.
Ecoute has a small main windows that feels a lot like an iPod. You can browse your music just as you would on an iPod or iPhone. When you play a song the window will shrink and display the album artwork for the song. Hover your mouse over the album artwork you can easly play, pause, and skip back or forward in the track. The bottom of the screen displays the time that is left in the track and you can click the search icon to search songs. Clicking the album artwork will display the song lyrics (if available).
Ecoute also has many features that iTunes lacks. You can add a small controller to your desktop. This will display the album artwork, song title, artist, and album. You can also use it to play/pause, and skip ahead or back. You don’t need to have Ecoute’s icon in the dock. It can be in the menu bar instead. Ecoute even has Last.fm scrobbling. If you don’t know what Last.fm is, it let’s you track and share what music you listen to.
Ecoute is a very basic app. While it would be nice if it included some more features, like playlist creation and the ability to tell if a playlist is new or not, it is a great application to listen to music and watch videos without opening iTunes. You can download a free trial of Ecoute from PixiApps and a license costs $10.
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December 28th, 2010 at 8:18 am
I’ve been using Ecoute for some time now, and I really like it. However, there are a few major defects you haven’t mentioned. It needs to sync with iTunes manually, meaning any changes to play counts and so on in either app won’t show up in the other until you tell Ecoute to update. Secondly, the app doesn’t recognize the “Skip when shuffling” setting, which would be fine except it considers audiobooks to be music. This means I can’t really shuffle my music or one of the thirty-odd audiobook pieces I have start playing, and it really sucks up RAM when it starts to play something that long.
It also doesn’t keep track of play position in podcasts and audiobooks, which makes it a bit less convienient to use for playing those.
If they can fix those issues, I’ll be buying, but not until then.
December 28th, 2010 at 8:18 am
Just use itunes instead of downloading software that will take up space and do pretty much the same job
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December 28th, 2010 at 8:18 am
[...] player. To import music and create playlists, you must go into iTunes, but to us that would be expected. This is a music player not a music [...]