It’s true. I see an open source application and I get all excited.
Hey, baby! You want to come play with me for a while???Oh, it gets me hot!
In all seriousness though, I am a huge supporter of the Open Source movement, and I will try just about any open source application as a substitution for proprietary software and I have in general been very pleased with those decisions. And if it does not meet my needs I just send in suggestions, go back to my old software and keep track of how the open source competition develops.
At my last job, I slowly but successfully converted my entire department over to using open source alternatives at work (it was easier because I was the boss). By the time I left, I had successfully hidden Internet Explorer and switched everyone over to using Apache, Firefox and Open Office among others. Given more time and control over how security was implemented on a organizational scale I might have even been able to move them over to Linux, but you take what you can get.
Anyway, my most recent open source love is musikCube. This is an open source music library/player for windows systems. It actually operates utilizing a tiny SQL-compliant database that is built into it. This allows for complex searches (without needing to know where the file is), synchronization of folders and dynamic playlists which build themselves based off of whatever conditions you predefine. If you want you can also really easily and quickly build static playlists with the search features built into the system.
Because of musikCube’s database-driven interface, it may take a little getting used to because we are all accustomed to the clunky file system of programs like Winamp, WMP and others and therefore are not used to a program that makes the whole process easy. Usually, if I was ever confused using musikCube it was because I was over-complicating the whole thing, instead of just trusting its highly intuitive interface.
Sure, musikCube is in development and occasionally a small bug pops up here and there, but to be totally honest it actually still outperforms every other application of its kind that I have used. Added bonuses are that it takes up very little memory to run, and is open source so the amount of additional features or plugins that can be developed is limitless. I am really tempted to try writing my own plugins for the program in order to add podcatching as a feature, but it has been about four years since I have tried my hands at C++, so I may just have to serve as an enthusiastic supporter on that count.
Still, I highly recommend the program. Once you get the feel of it you will not want to go back. Get it here!