For the past few days I have been using MusikCube to listen to music on both my home and work computers. MusikCube is an open sourced music player that was just released in a version 1.0 form. Initial impressions are that I like the player overall but there are some interface items that I feel need to be looked into a little better. What I did like about the software was its small system footprint and its responsiveness.

The overall interface takes its queues from iTunes with your main browser on the right and your playlist list on the left. You can drag and drop to add files to a playlist or create a “dynamic” playlist. To begin with, the dynamic playlist feature needs some major work. To create a dynamic playlist you have to type in a SQL statement so that the software can query the SQLLite database that stores all the song file’s information. This is not going to work for regular users. It works fine for geeks and people who will actually go and read up on how to make something work, but normals joes do not do that and will look at this with disgust. On the bright side though, it gives excellent control over the dynamic playlist creation to power users.

Another thing I really liked about MusikCube was something called the “Collected” playlist. This was used to browse and play music that you have downloaded or ripped that you are not quite sure you want in your actual library. This allows users to kind of try new things without having to mix it into their main library.

I did not get a chance to play with the device side of things (connecting external hard drives, iPods, and other music players) so I can not comment on how well it integrates with music devices. But I have noticed that its use of ID3v2 tags is very limited. While iTunes allows you to edit a large percentage of available ID3v2 tags, MusikCube is limited to around 8 or 9. I am a metadata nutcase and the more information I can edit about a track, the happier I am so MusikCube loses out on that front.

I think that MusikCube 1.0 is just that, a version 1 of the software. I would really like to see MusikCube increase its overall support of ID3v2 tags and work out some of its interface quirks. I still encourage you to check out this great piece of software.

[Technorati Tag: Music]
[Technorati Tag: Technology]