A DoubleTwist on the same old iTunes and Zune music apps
September and October mark a nonstop cavalcade of new consumer gadgets, fellow sensation-seekers. So maybe it’s not exactly out of line that the thing that’s truly grabbed my attention this week is actually the first official edition of a free app which promises to give you some help loading media on these things.
DoubleTwist just got its official 1.0 release on Wednesday. Apple’s iTunes app is “the iTunes of iPods and iPhones.” Microsoft’s Zune app is “the iTunes of Zune players.” DoubleTwist seeks to be the iTunes for absolutely everything else. You got a smartphone? You got a music player? You got a Kindle or a car navigator that can play music files? Download DoubleTwist. On top of being a desktop media player and library manager, DoubleTwist can easily sync your media onto any of those devices.
It’s very much a version 1.0 but I like what I see so far. It gets its basic style, window layout and functions from the familiar iTunes interface. All of your media players appear in a tidy little Device list on the left side of the window, right alongside your playlists and links to your desktop music library.
And a Windows Media Player influence is apparent in the manner by which you import your existing media: you don’t. DoubleTwist simply looks inside your PC or Mac’s standard media folders and indexes these files where they lie, though it has the ability to work closely with the iTunes music database if you also happen to have that app installed. DoubleTwist can indeed work quite intimately with iTunes. Witness its third-neatest feature: the app can import all of iTunes’ existing playlists. “Smart” playlists included ... though it relies on iTunes to adjust these dynamic playlists as the status of your iTunes Library changes.
DoubleTwist’s second-neatest feature would be the slick, graphical and very welcome iTunes-like front end it provides for the Amazon MP3 Store. It’s a big improvement over Amazon’s classic web interface and makes it a lot easier and more fun to browse and sample new music.
The app also has a bunch of social features. Why? Because it’s 2009 and you’d just as soon release an app without media features as you’d go out to dinner in 1978 without wearing a leisure suit.
(Wait, I take that back: if it’s 1978 I’d imagine there’s a fair chance you’d be streaking.
The social-media bits are DoubleTwist’s fourth-best features. You can share any item in your music, video, or photo library with any other DoubleTwist user, and you can “follow” your friends’ media habits via the “feeds” that DoubleTwist establishes of your musical habits. Like all social features, you’ll either love it or be completely indifferent, depending on your level of interest in being Social.
But make no mistake: the unmistakeable top feature of DoubleTwist is its simple goal to be the one media app that can manage just about any gadget that can play music, video, or photos. DoubleTwist can sync to any phone or player that mounts on your desktop as a plain-vanilla USB Mass Storage device. It was even able to sync MP3 files to the bootleg fake iPhone 3G I bought in China a couple of months ago.
There’s one big caveat: if there’s a way to tell DoubleTwist “Please sync the following playlists to this device every time it shows up on the USB bus” I haven’t found it yet. Maybe the feature is in there somewhere. The lesser caveat of this app is that it’s very poorly-documented.
Although manual syncing is simple (just drag media or playlists onto the device’s icon) I do wish I could simply dock, sync, and go, like I can with my iPhone and other players that have their own manufacturer-made sync apps.
(Oh, and a nice bit of irony: iPhones and iPods are practically the only major media players that DoubleTwist can’t deal with. Supposedly the DoubleTwist team is working on it.)
An app like DoubleTwist was inevitable, and utterly necessary. One of the summer’s most entertaining bit of ongoing corporate bickering is the spat between Palm and Apple.
Palm has incorporated a hack into their Pre phone to enable it to sync media via iTunes. It accomplishes this by bamboozling iTunes into thinking the Pre is actually an iPhone. Apple takes a dim view of this (as does the trade group that polices the behavior of USB devices) and keeps updating iTunes to block these shenanigans.
But if DoubleTwist becomes a true standard, these and so many other problems will be reduced to minor annoyances at worst. It seems as though every device that arrives in your home comes with its own special app for moving media into it. So your desktop is cluttered with single-purpose tools and none of them ever seem to work particularly well.
I’ve been getting a lot of use out of DoubleTwist over the past few months and I anticipate that it’ll be my go-to solution for shoving media into my pocket. It could be much better, but sophistication will come with time. And until then, we have sweet, welcome functionality.