We define a computer as a device which is used to help us out performing some computational jobs, many of you will be raising your eyebrows as the usage of computer extends to listening to music, downloading albums, watching movies and many other entertainment purposes too. We know players such as the default Windows Media Player, VLC Player and Real Player and what are their strengths and weaknesses. They are sufficient to fulfill most of our needs but do they provide everything you need? Perhaps you should look at some media players like Audials One to answer this question.
Features At a Glance
- Find, listen to, record, manage web radio, get MP3
- Music Search Engine
- Find, subscribe and download podcasts
- Find, record and convert music videos
- Use the wish list community
- Copy and convert DRM-protected music and audio books
- Record and convert web videos
Audials One Features
About.com calls the media player as a ‘Digital Swiss Army Knife’ for downloading free and legal media with large set of tools. We were initially concerned about how they can manage such large set of tools, but after installing we found that they were quite intuitively arranged with tabs located at the tops named Radio, Search, Wishlist, Web, Podcasts and Converter. Lets discuss them one after another.
Radio
It has a radiotracker that connects to a large number of radio stations with its huge database. You can listen to your favorite radio station based on your favorite requirement such as genre, favorite stations and wish list. I hear you saying what is so big with that, there are many many softwares available for that. Yes, but its specialty is that you can also record the audio output to MP3 format. Coool! isn’t it?
Search
The Search facility gives you access to a meta search engine only for music and videos. Isn’t it exactly what you were wanting? I just searched for Bob Dylan and it gave me results within seconds and there you can see my favorite song “Blowing in the Wind” from esnips – Exactly what I was searching for!
WishList
Make your wishlist and it will search for the songs when it is available.
Web
This feature lets you record audio and videos from Websites. Select a particular portion on your browser and it will record the videos that are being played in that portion. I could imagine nothing simpler.
Podcasts
A few days ago, there was two podcasts came at the same time and I had to make my mind that I would load this one first and not that one next. But it seems that now, it is not necessary to make the sacrifice. The podcast in Audial can record multiple audio streams in parallel and making the efficient use of your time and bandwidth. If the URL isn’t already present in the database, you can simply add the URLs to the list by clicking on the button.
Converter
The converter is really a bonus for media player but when we used it we did not get the quality that a full fledged converter could deliver. The conversion quality was not satisfying and also it seemed to take too long when converting the files in our Intel Dual Core system with 1GB RAM.
Pros
- Impressive UI
- Wide range of tools
- Price seems to be a value for money for this ‘Do it all’ Application
Cons
- Video Conversion quality not up to the mark
- Though tools are intuitively organized, it is sometimes difficult to find them
- If you want a single feature of this application, the price may seem expensive.
Conclusion
What we all want is to set music free. Audial exactly hits that target. With its access to over 20K internet stations and international video, music and podcast portals, you get the entry to a free entertainment world you were looking for. You can also convert the media to the format you want removing the annoying DRM copy protection. After using the using the players like Windows Media Player, VLC Player and Real Player.
On 13 January 2010, The Nielsen Company reported top search providers data for December 2009. According to this report Google still dominating search market followed by Yahoo and Bing/MSN. This search includes search data for total searches, unique searchers, search share, and all other search figures.Searches represent the total number of queries conducted at the provider. Example: An estimated 6.7 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search, representing 67.3 percent of all search queries conducted during the given time period.
Google Lab released a new tool called “
Today Google has released Google Apps for Windows Mobile. Google Apps for Windows mobile gives an easy access to all Google apps to Windows Mobile users from their today screen. Windows Mobile users can now search with fewer clicks and with search history it make really easy to search over the internet with less typing. Pocket PC users can add the Google Mobile App to the start menu (Settings: Menus) or configure a hardware key (Settings: Buttons) to provide easy access from within any application on your phone.
