More MP3 Software

Evan Kleiman - 2001.06.27

Q: I read your last article on MP3 software. Are there any other ones that will work with my lesser-powered Mac?

A: Yes, there certainly are! There are many different MP3 players out there for your computer that don't require as many system resources as the others do, but remember for any MP3 player to work properly, you need some type of a Power PC.

One of my favorite "budget" MP3 players is SoundApp. It has many of the features common to larger and more expensive computer-based MP3 players, such as the ability to play multiple different formats and play lists. Also, SoundApp is the only MP3 playing application out there that can be run on a non-PowerPC processor.

Another good, smaller MP3 player available is GrayAMP. Now in version 1.2, it has such features as a play list as well as many others. The application size itself is a mere 295K, so you won't have to worry about it taking up too much of your very valuable system resources.

But if you want MP3 applications that have more features, what do you do? Well, there are still more MP3 players out there.

All of the more feature rich MP3 players take up more system resources, but this goes without saying. The best - and one of my favorite - larger MP3 players that have more features is BayTex Party Pro 2.5. This application deems itself as a "virtual DJ," with such features as an auto-mixing play list, two faders, and jingles (short little snippets of songs that you can play, such as real radio DJs use). It really is the "virtual DJ" it claims to be. Other standard features included in BayTex Party Pro are skins and a loop manager, which allows a song or jingle to be played multiple times.

Another good more feature rich and of course larger MP3 player is Sound Jam MP by Cassidy and Greene. It has all of the common features, such as skins and a play list, but also has a unique encoder. This MP3 encoder (the program that creates MP3 files) is unique because it can compress your MP3 files to one-tenth of the size.

The last good larger MP3 player is Mac Amp, an application that I've used for some time. It has common features of the others, plus an ID3 tag editor. (ID3 tags are those little things inside the MP3 files that display the name of the song, the artist, etc. on your MP3 player's screen.) Also, its $10 price tag can make anyone happy.

Unfortunately, it seems with most of Napster's services and files shutting down, the MP3 craze is dying down. But until then, you can get out there and listen to your favorite MP3 music files with these great programs!