musikCube 1.0rc2 vs foobar2000 0.9.4.1 vs EvilPlayer 1.16

musikCube 1.0rc2 vs foobar2000 0.9.4.1 vs EvilPlayer 1.16

Memory Usage (Without playing a song):

mC: 4,468K
FB: 12,092K
EP: 2,352K

Playing Song:

mC: 9,160K
FB: 14,584K
EP: 3,528K

EP +1

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First Run:

mC: Pretty simple. You select the folder to want to be browsed and added to you library and it goes to town. Takes a few minutes to add close to 4000 songs.
FB: Just as simple as mC but a tad bit faster.
EP: Not as simple as the other two, but still not difficult. About the same amount of time as FB, maybe a little faster.

FB + 1

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Plugins:

mC: Have a handful only. Mainly codecs.
FB: Has a considerable amount more than either mC or EP. Many being pretty good, including an iPod plugin for all you people out there that own iPods. DOWN WITH iTUNES!
EP: Also only has a hanful. Not particularly useful though.

FB + 1

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Skins:

N/A since these programs aren’t particularly meant to be skinned

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HotKeys:

mC: Will use a keyboards built in hotkeys. Can’t edit/change/create your own.
FB: Uses the keyboard hotkeys and allows you to create your own.
EP: Doesn’t use the keyboard pre-builts and the ones they do use can’t be changed.

FB + 1

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Playlists:

mC: Handles them pretty good. Can’t import through the player and I don’t know where the other playlists are saved to, to try and attempt to place others

there. Can’t export playlists or choose their type either.
FB: Can save m3u, fpl and m3u8. Can import/export. Handles them WONDERFULLY! It opens each playlist into a new tab and are easy to make.
EP: Does an ok job doing it. Nothing special. Can save EEP, m3u and PLS. Doesn’t handle near as good as FB.

FB + 1

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Video:

N/A

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Layout:

mC: Pretty good. Simple to use, clean and easy. The 4 skins that exist for it are ok.
FB: When using Column UI, its great. Very clean, very very simple. And in my opinion kinda pretty.
EP: Just a list of songs. Not buttons, no menus. Not good in my opinion.

FB + 1

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Final Scores:

musikCube: 0
FooBar 2000: 5
EvilPlayer : 1

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Overall:
All these programs where designed to use minimal amounts of memory while providing you with options you need (in each programs views) to play music and play it well. In my opinion, EvilPlayer is one of the worse prorgrams I have used solely because it doesn’t support ID3 tags! WTF! Who the hell doesn’t support these tags other than EP? And the programmer says they will never be support, automatically sratching the port from the list forever and I suggest eveyone does the same.
musickCube just doesn’t cut it. It is slightly worse in every way compared to foobar, including program stability. Overall foobar is an amazing program which I look forward to using ^_^

Google Calender

For those that haven’t used this piece of online software before, here’s your chance to read up on it before testing it.

I am a web development student will quite a few assignments to complete and a few tests every week or so. I also have appointments and places to be outside of class (Yes I do sometimes leave my computer to participate in this thing call life).

Google calender first requires you to have a google account so if you don’t already have one run over to google and make yourself one. Its pretty simple. Next log in and check out ‘my account’ where you will see a list of the what you have on your account. Somewhere on that screen you’ll see an option to join more features of google or you can try this link.

Now you can several different ‘calenders’ on your big calender. Basically you can break up how the dates are organized. Be its by school work, personal, work, sports, etc. It is easy to tell the difference between these because you can set them to one of 21 colors.

There are also 5 views for you to see your calender; day, week, month, next 4 days and agenda. I personally use the agenda setting to view all my events.

You can receive notifications by email or on your cell phone of upcoming events, but the only problem is it only works for your first calender. This product is still in development and haven’t added the feature to receive reminders for all calenders yet (which I am impatiently waiting for).

Creating, editing and moving events is extremely simple. You simply click on the day you want, and enter the event in. If you are in day/week/4 day view you can enter the time of the event but simply clicking where time is. So if the event is at 730, you click on the 730 line and an hour long event appears. You can increase or decrease its lenght simply by dragging the bottom of the event box.

If you are in another view you add the event and then just click edit. You can change the times to whatever you place and make them span days if you want. An example is on my calender I have an event for a party which goes into the wee hours of the next day and it is easily displayed in a way that makes since.

You can also add the time into the event title and have it set the time (which is something I just discovered writing this blog) .

Another nice feature is the ability to share your calenders and have discussions on events. Example; I am manging a PHP project at the moment (really I am) and I am able to share my calender with the people working with me, and we  can talk about the meeting in a little discussions  thread, and then afterwards  I can recap the meeting in the description part of the event so we have a record of what was done.

Overall, Google calender is one of the best calenders I have used. I have tried several but never really used them for one main reason; I can’t edit it anywhere. With Google, I can edit from school, home, a friends house or wherever I am which makes it far more useful than a program based calender.

So if you have a bust scheulde or just want to make your life more organized, give it a try. It’s definitely worth it.