Ecoute

The following is the sorted history of my seemingly never ending hunt for a competent media player and/or iTunes controller. It’s a long and pretty boring read, so if you’re impatient or hate moving your eyes I recommend you head over to Ecoute right now and download their wonderful standalone media player.

Starting with CoverSutra

This was my first shot at an iTunes controller. The UI was beautiful, the built-in notifications were unobtrusive, and the work flow was relatively decent. The one thing that was missing, for me, was the ability to do a search and play only the search results. After months of waiting and seeing nearly all customer requests ignored, I started to look elsewhere.

Happening upon Cover Stream

I used Cover Stream for a few weeks and I really started to fall in love. I think it was the far superior artwork display on the desktop that pulled me away from CoverSutra. For some reason I felt I could live with Cover Stream’s unpolished/unintuitive UI elements like track listings and search results. In the end, however, I was still craving the ability to search and play only the search results.

Issues with iTunes controllers

The common problem with iTunes controllers like Cover Stream and CoverSutra is that they rely on iTunes running in the background. Anyone that knows anything about iTunes knows that it’s far too bloated and memory hungry to be used as a media player when you’re trying to be productive. Another annoying thing is that these iTunes controllers add playlists to the iTunes library as you use the app. If you have an auto-sync device like an iPod or AppleTV these playlists get copied over. Chances are these playlists are uselss outside of using the controller app. In my case, my AppleTV was filled up with superfluous playlists. Me no likey.

Note about Cover Stream’s History:
Now, to be fair, Cover Stream did get overhauled as a standalone media player that eliminated most of these annoyances, but flak from his customers forced the author to abandon the idea and go back to the controller model. I was one of the unhappy customers and I equated my disappointment to the standalone media player concept when in retrospect I see that it was really the work flow, feature set, and overall UI that bugged me.

Along came Ecoute

Ecoute is not an iTunes controller, let’s get that out of the way right now. And because it doesn’t require iTunes to be running Ecoute takes up far less memory and resources. The great thing is that it uses your organized iTunes library for its source media list. Ecoute lets you view any media from music, movies, TV shows, and podcasts, while also sub-sorting them by playlist, artist, genre, etc.

The UI looks and works similarly to the iPhone/iPod touch… clicking an option slides to the next panel, clicking the list icon shows the songs associated with that record, etc. There are details hidden everywhere too, from overlaying the current playing song’s lyrics (by clicking the album art in the main window – it even scrubs Google if lyrics aren’t stored in the media) to Webkit desktop themes that are easily converted from Bowtie if need be. In my experience with the app so far, there’s nothing I would change. It feels very polished.

I even spent some time and easily ported over my favorite CoverSutra mod. It was actually quite liberating building HTML/CSS without having to worry about IE:

In my opinion the single best feature of Ecoute is its default behavior to play the displayed media results, whether they be search, genre browsing, etc. By simply accessing the search shortcut, typing a few letters, and choosing a track, you get instant playback of whatever you were looking for. The great part is that the next track that plays will be part of the search results. This is exactly how I want to listen to my music. CoverSutra’s behavior is to play a random track, and conversely, Cover Stream does nothing.

What’s more, the author has been adding logical user-requested features at an extremely fast rate. You can’t go wrong when a developer actually listens to his audience. Even better, a paid license lasts a lifetime rather than just through point releases. If you haven’t yet, I really recommend giving Ecoute a good try.