Jeffrey C. Long

Technology is a fascinating little monkey. Ever since discovering The Trader’s Database a website with links to downloadable concerts from trade friendly musical artists I’ve been exposed to a ton of high quality music. But one of the dilema’s has been how to store and listen to the music. My hard drive is rather full. And the music is compressed in formats other then mp3 that don’t hurt the fidelity of the audio. The result of these compression schemes is that you either need to decompress the audio into large .wav files to listen to, or you need a player that will decompress them on the fly. iTunes won’t do this. So, my search unveiled Mac Amp Lite X. This is a former shareware program that is now available for free. It is old. You know that instinct that new is good and old is bad? It’s not true. This is a solid program that does things that I wish iTunes did. The number one thing that it does besides playing all these weird compression schemes is that it lets me build a playlist without importing the song. In iTunes, you have to import the music into the database before you can create a playlist. This precludes me burning a CD of mp3′s or .shn’s or FLAC’s (the lossless compression schemes) and then playing them back directly from the disc. But Mac Amp Lite X can do it. Tres cool. [Jeffrey raises a toast to the developers of Mac Amp Lite X]