Lately I’ve downloaded a few programs/extensions that I highly recommend. So I’ll share my finds with you.

1. MediaMonkey

Although I love the idea of SongBird it was still a bit too buggy to use as one’s default music player, so at the moment I’m using MediaMonkey, the free version of which is about the equivalent to iTunes but the “Gold” version ($19.95) is an iTunes killer. I love it because it has all the functionality I wanted (and some things I didn’t know I’d want):

• File monitor: it automatically adds songs to the library when you add them on your computer. iTunes’ lack of this function what what made me kick the boot in and give up on it. Everytime I added songs to iTunes it would make another copy of the songs I already had there (I had the copy option on). I ended up having 10 duplicates of some songs and none of others. HOWEVER, MediaMonkey fixed with its…
• Duplicate song finder: you can browse either songs that have the same artist and title tags OR songs that have the same bit pattern (ignoring the tags)! A life-saver.
• Smarter AutoPlaylists: I ended up writing a script in iTunes to create a playlist that would have all albums with more than 8 songs on it. I’d have to rerun the script anytime I wanted to update the playlist. MediaMonkey the ability to do create such a playlist as well as your usual “Top Rated” etc.
• Support for non-iPod devices: I know that most people have iPods these days, but I have a creative and it’s great except for the fact that the software that comes with it is pretty poor. MediaMonkey allows me to use my device like iTunes does with iPods, create and edit playlists, auto sync etc.
• “Sleep” function: I didn’t know I’d want this, but I LOVE it. Every night I put the sleep timer on for aboout 20 minutes and set the volume to fade out over the last few minutes. It then hibernates my computer. I used to get out of bed to shut everything down - now I don’t have to!*
• Party mode: this allows you to stop people at your party from accessing other programs on the computer but allow them to select the music. Lots of different levels of security.

Of course it also has all those functions you’d expect: the little browser window thing that iTunes has, the ability to burn and rip cds, podcasts, auto-copying to folder, auto-renaming etc.

Also, I keep my music on an external hard drive and when I unplug it MediaMonkey doesn’t decided to move where the library is kept, which iTunes kept on doing. That was the final straw.

*and no, they’re not giving me anything to write this review. my overwhelming positivity is simply as product of being so pissed off with iTunes/Windows Media Player.

2. Thunderbird 2.0* + GMail IMAP + MinimizeToTray extension

I’ve always been waiting for Thunderbird to be obviously better than Outlook, in the same way that Firefox undeniably better than IE (oh, shush, if you knew better you wouldn’t want to argue with me *wink*). I’m not sure why but it’s not quite there yet - it’s equally good as Outlook for what I use it for, and the extensions make it better… maybe I’m just asking too much.

OH, but I’ve been using it predominantly as RSS feeder for years and years now. Mainly because I didn’t have a need for the email functionality - UNTIL NOW!

I was so excited about ability to access Gmail on IMAP for free. I followed the instructions and it all worked. Though a few things to note: you may need to open the Google’s IMAP and SMTP ports on your firewall. And if you’ve selected to use British English then the instructions all say to use “your_username@googlemail.com” rather than “your_username@gmail.com” - but just substitute your actual address.
And then it’ll all work like clockwork. Because it’s IMAP and not POP when you read an email on Thunderbird it reflects that on Gmail online and vice-versa. UPDATE: This Google help file is very useful and is only shown when you go looking for IMAP help.
I’d also install the MinimizeToTray extension and then you can leave it running all the time without taking up toolbar space.

*Note: The MinimizeToTray extension doesn’t work with 3.0pre - that’s why I recommend 2.0.

3. DownThemAll extention for Firefox/Thunderbird

DownThemAll is kind of like an internal firefox/thunderbird wget - it allows you to download all the images/webpages/zipped files etc that are on or linked on a given page. It allows for regex commands - so I use it to automatically download the .doc/.pdf./ppt/.rtf files on the lecture notes pages of my uni subjects: /(\.(rtf|doc|pdf|ppt))$/

It also has an accelerator, which does seem to make large files download quite a bit faster* and the ability to pause and resume downloads. I highly recommend it!

*though it may be just the placebo affect - i’ve never really tested to see if it is quicker

Edit:

What I’m in need of - RSS for non-RSS pages

I’ve been looking for a tool that coverts webpages without rss feeds to an rss feed so I can just add the pages to Thunderbird and have it automatically check for updates.

• At the moment I’m trialing http://page2rss.com - Edit 2: Problems: (1)  It doesn’t display the website itself, but it’s own page which you can sort of see the updates (2) Seems to have a delay of a number of hours before it picks up the changes…
• I’m now trying http://www.baekdal.com/web2rss/ - this solves Problem (1) above, and creates Problem (3) it doesn’t work with sites that incorrectly use their timestamp headers… or something :(
• I might give the Firefox Update Scanner extension a try, but I’d really prefer to have all my webpage updates in Thunderbird*

I’ve come across things like Dapper and YahooPipes but they seem far too complicated for what I want. I don’t want to have to sign in to be able to set things up and I’m happy to have the whole page just as an RSS feed. If you have any suggestions it’d be greatly appreciated :)

*also I’m using Firefox 3.0beta 4 and Update Scanner is also still only in Beta support for Firefox 3 - I haven’t updated because of Mr Karan’s advice “Firefox 3.0b5 is less stable than 3.0b4 - stay away!”)

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