ALSong
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| ALSong | |
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| Image:ALSong-screenshot.png ALSong v1.52 Running under Windows XP |
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| Maintainer: | ESTsoft Corp. |
| Stable release: | 2006-08-31 (2006-08-31) [+/-] |
| Preview release: | 2006-08-31 (2006-08-31) [+/-] |
| OS: | Windows |
| Use: | MP3 Lyrics Player |
| License: | Proprietary |
| Website: | www.altools.net |
ALSong is a live lyrics MP3 player from ESTsoft for the Microsoft Windows platform, and is the eighth in the ALTools line of free PC utilities.
The multi-format audio player looks like a Winamp clone at first glance and mimics much of Winamp's functionality including a skinnable interface with themes.
Unique to ALSong are a collapsible playlist, archived music playback, virtual mixed album creation, and a live lyrics server that provides synchronized lyrics for music.
Synchronized lyrics playback in ALSong comes from the ALSong Lyrics Server and not a local source. Lyrics are temporarily cached on the local machine but deleted when ALSong shuts down.
[edit] File Format Support
As of version 1.52, audio format support is weak compared to more mature players, but includes many of the most popular including APE, CDA (CDs), MP3, MPGA, MOD, OGG, FLAC, S3M, and WMA. ALSong also supports playback of ALZ, RAR and ZIP files with supported audio files inside them.
ALSong introduces three new file formats:
- *.asl - ALSong Playlist
- *.sab - ALSong Album
- *.ssk - ALSong Skin
The ALSong playlist format expands on the popular PLS and M3U formats that both present playlists as a static ordered list of song entries. An ALSong playlist on the other hand presents a hierarchial and mutable structure of both song entries and nodes. As a result, ALSong playlists mimic file system structures. Songs and folders can be reordered at will without disturbing the physical file structure, and virtual folders can also be created to reorganize music into user-defined structures. It supports the PLS and M3U playlists as well as ASX files.
SAB and SSK file support in ALSong borrows from its elder sibling application ALZip for ZIP compression but does not require ALZip to be installed.
ALSong albums are self-contained and portable virtual albums. Inside, SAB files contain a directory structure with graphics, HTML, CSS, INI, MP3, and SABLNK place holder files. ALSong ALbum files are highly customizable, but the default themes resemble record album covers and CD jackets with clickable playlists.
SSK skin files are ZIP compressed bitmap and XML files.
[edit] How it works
ZIP, RAR, and ALZ format-compressed files are silently extracted into user's Temporary file folder. Due to this, if files are big, format-compressed files may take longer to load, sometimes up to minute, in AMD Athlon 64-bit processor 3500+ 2.1GHz, with 1gb of physical memory.
Due to player's passive play, memory handle is quite low, no matter how many bitrate the file played is based upon.
