i Tunes can be a tremendous CPU hog, and there are no two ways about it. Apple has also made it very difficult to skin the media player, despite the overwhelming demand for the ability to do so. On the other hand, iTunes has some features that many people consider to be compelling, including the ability to stream your iTunes playlists to others on your local network.
The folks at Whamb.com have developed an MP3 player that addresses these needs, and then some. The player is called Whamb, and the company is billing it as a low CPU usage MP3 player that is skinnable, supports OGG Vorbis files, and can share your songs via Rendezvous. From the company:
Welcome to the next mp3 player generation! Our new player, called Whamb, features all the excellence of Mac OS X to offer you the best in both graphics and sound, using respectively OS Xis Quartz and CoreAudio engines. Weive tried to make it as intuitive and innovating as possible, for example you will never have to re-drag your MP3s manually in the playlist after sorting them to get them listed: Whamb synchronizes it all automatically with the Finder.
Here are some of its features:
- Low CPU usage (we mean, very low)
- Skinnable Player window, you can easily create your own
- Supports MP3 internet streams
- Compact, fast and synchronized playlists
- Compatible with both MP3 and OGG Vorbis
- Dock Menu
- G4is AltiVec optimization
- CD Audio playback with CDDB support
By the way, how would you like to share your music on your local network without doing any configuration? Whamb can do that!
Using the Rendezvous technology from Apple, we made this possible. Just open Whamb on two or more machines in a local network, open the Rendezvous window, select a machine, then a playlist, and voilà! Music from any Mac on your local network is streamed to you as you would listen to mp3 files located on your hard disk.
Whamb is still under development and is updated quite often to meet Usersi requests, so donit forget to run the "Check For Updates" command from time to time.
Give it a try! We hope you will appreciate what we humbly think is the smartest mp3 player around.
Stop by the Whamb.com site for more information.