MediaMonkey 2.4.862 RC2

Official product name: MediaMonkey
Version # previewed: 2.4.862 RC2
Publisher: Ventis Media
Developer and URL: Ventis Media; www.ventismedia.com
ETA: Q2 2005
Why you should care: The best alterative to iTunes out there.

Like the idea of iTunes keeping track of and playing your music library but hate giving up control of the music files and directories you’ve spent years organizing? Looking for one app to rip and burn music? Need an easy-to-use music program full of features? Want to easily synch your portable audio player with the library on your computer? MediaMonkey is for you.

The app initially scans your media files, reads their ID3 (or equivalent) tags, and creates a comprehensive internal database. You can sort and play music by genre, artist, title, album, or era; use directories/sub-directories; and create playlists with drag and drops. Unlike iTunes, playlists are standard M3Us. Searches are lightning fast, too.

Using LAME MP3 (and other encoders), MM can quickly rip music into practically any format and bit rate, and at the maximum speed your hardware allows. If MM finds almost any version of Nero Burning ROM on your computer, it can directly burn discs utilizing Nero’s DLL’s.

The beta’s main purpose is iPod support. With earlier versions iPod’s proprietary internal database proved a tough nut to crack. With this support there are now many iPod-related options that go beyond iTunes. (There’s no support for DRMed iTunes music, however.)

The shareware version is a complete package, but the freeware has plenty of features to satisfy almost anyone.

iPodder 2.1 beta2

Official product name: iPodder
Version # previewed: 2.1 beta 2
Publisher: The iPodder Lemon team
Developer and URL: The iPodder Lemon team; ipodder.sourceforge.net
ETA: Q2 2005
Why you should care: A new way to download and listen to audio.

What do you get when you combine MP3s and blogs? Audio-blogs, or what many people call podcasts, as many audioblogs are loaded on iPods to listen to on the go. iPodder makes collecting podcasts simple, even if you use something other than an iPod.

Podcasting is nothing more than collecting blogs and their attachments via RSS. You can use an RSS reader that handles attachments to save podcasts to your local drive and play them back with Winamp, Windows Media Player, etc. Apps such as iPodder, however, make the process simple by automating many aspects of keeping up with a regular audioblog.

You use iPodder by giving it URLs to podcasts or by consulting its built-in list of podcasts. iPodder downloads podcasts and descriptions and then new podcasts during your next download session. If you use iTunes, iPodder automatically injects the podcasts into your library and automatically syncs to your iPod so you have your podcasts ready to roll. If you don’t use iTunes, the files are dumped into folders and sorted by the name of the sites they came from.

iPodder can automatically check for new podcasts based on a schedule you set or manually. It can play back podcasts directly or pass them to an audio player (though you can only choose iTunes or Windows Media Player). iPodder has a high level of polish, stability, and elegance that belie its freeware status. Mac and Linux versions are available.

iPodder is simple enough for beginners but advanced enough to keep experts using it every day. iPodder may become to podcasting what Netscape 1.0 was to the World Wide Web.

FastStone Image Viewer 2.12 Beta

Official product name: Kerio MailServer for Windows
Version # previewed: 6.1.0 Beta 5
Publisher: Kerio Technologies
Developer and URL: Kerio Technologies; www.kerio.com
ETA: Q3 2005
Why you should care: An email server with everything you’ll ever need.

Third-party thumbnailers are nothing new to Windows, even though Microsoft finally got around to adding some basic thumbnailing functionality to its own operating systems fairly recently. FastStone Image Viewer, however, has the competition beat in many areas, including having a great set of features and an unbeatable free price. Even if you’ve paid a king’s ransom for other thumbnailers, you should consider adding FastStone to your arsenal.

Let’s get one irony out of the way: FastStone isn’t terribly fast at handling some chores. Most thumbnailers work by scanning a folder full of image files and adding the rendered thumbnails into its own internal database so that when you return to that folder, thumbnails appear quickly. This initial folder-scanning process takes much longer than some commercial products, especially when the number of files in a folder is greater than 1,000. Returning to a prescanned folder, however, is appropriately speedy.

That said, FastStone is remarkable in that its authors have pinpointed what most people want to do with their photo collection. Of course, you can create slideshows, add comments, and organize photos, but there are unusual features, too. One is Email Photo, where selected photos are automatically resized, renamed, re-rendered, and sent automatically to your email’s “create message” window. There’s also a Compare Images feature, where selected images appear side by side with linked interactive panning and zooming. In addition, there are many batch-processing options, in which you can rename, rotate, resize, crop, adjust colors, and tag text or a watermark to files.

Overall, the program has a high-quality feel, complete with attractive skins, well designed dialog boxes and menus, and plenty of customization options. Given its price there’s no reason not to download it, even if you already have a similar program in place.

Kerio MailServer for Windows 6.1.0 Beta 5

Official product name: FastStone Image Viewer
Version # previewed: 2.12 Beta
Publisher: FastStone Soft
Developer and URL: FastStone Soft; www.faststone.org
ETA: Q3 2005
Why you should care: The best free thumbnailer you can get for Windows.

Want to run your own mail server but don’t want to go through the Linux and Sendmail learning curve? Kerio MailServer may be the ticket, although at close to $700 for 20 users, it isn’t exactly cheap. But you do get a lot for your money.

KMS is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms, and all offer the same feature set, ease of use, and pricing scales, though the beta is only available for Windows for now. Unlike some email server options, all account setup and server setup works via a clean and easy-to-use GUI; if you have any experience with any type of mail server, you’ll slip into the KMS groove immediately.

KMS includes everything but the kitchen sink. The highly regarded SpamAssassin antispam system is completely integrated into the server, along with McAfee antivirus, WebMail, and WAP mail, and many of these work in concert. For example, to train the Bayesian antispam filters, just use WebMail and mark messages as spam. You can also connect to several external antivirus scanners, such as Norton, AVG, and others.

WebMail is especially full-featured. By making extensive use of JavaScript, the WebMail interface looks and feels like Outlook, complete with context-sensitive pop-up menus when you click the right mouse button. For slower connections, however, users can also use a low-bandwidth interface, which also works well.

The beta version is basically an incremental update; there’s an updated version of SpamAssassin, an updated plug-in for Outlook integration, and tweaks to the HTML editor in the WebMail module.

It isn’t often that just anyone can check out the features of an enterprise-level mail server, but during the beta program, that time is now. Go see how the other half lives.

by Warren Ernst

Send Us Your Betas: Know of software in the beta stage that’s deserving of some attention? Let us know. We’ll take a look at it and possibly give it a go-round. Send your prospects to bleedingedge@cpumag.com.