Open-source media player Miro 4 has recently been released to help you “break free” from iTunes. The media player. which runs on OS X, Windows, or Linux, can play all of your existing libraries without importing, and has tons of interesting and impressive features.
Miro 4 works with your existing media libraries without any copying involved. Just point the application to your music and video folders (including the iTunes music library) and voila – your media automagically appears.
It also comes with native support for the Amazon MP3 store, and has a built-in torrent client. Desktop and mobile devices running the program can share and transfer music and video to each other over Wi-Fi, and the developer reports that versions for the iPad and other tablets may be coming soon.
It also enables you to download YouTube and Amazon videos, as well as pulling the video from podcasts and torrents, and converts any video file to iOS-friendly MP4 or h.264 formats for easy viewing. The program also enables you to download Android software from Android Market and the Amazon Appstore, and sync them to your devices.
Will this replace iTunes? For so many reasons, certainly not. It cannot sync with an iDevice, does not support Apple’s apps, firmware updates, etc. Can it take the place of iTunes as a media player? Possibly. Regardless of whether or not it can replace iTunes, I certainly hope that enough Apple users take notice of this that Apple decides to kick in into high gear and release a redesigned version of iTunes that actually works.
Miro is free, and available now.
[9to5Mac]