aTunes is a music player with ambition. It aims to not only play music in MP3, Ogg, WMA, WAV, FLAC, and MP4 formats, but also manage your music as well, letting you keep your collection organized, rip CDs, edit tags, and find information about songs from web services. You can even use it as a podcast manager or an online radio player. And because it’s written in Java, it can run on just about any operating system.
Spanish developer Alex Aranda started to work on aTunes almost four years ago. “Initially I just wanted a simple application to transfer contents from my iPod to a computer. I didn’t like any of the programs I found, so started to work on aTunes as a tool to read tags from audio files and copy them to disk. When I finished the basic tool I started to add more features.”
Today the aTunes team includes, in addition to Aranda, developers Sylvain Gaudard and Thomas Beckers. “We also have occasional contributions from users who send patches, which we review and add to aTunes. A team of translators has translated the application to 23 languages. Every time a new version nears release, if we added some new literals, we send a message out a week in advance to all translators so they can update translations for the release.”
aTunes’ most recent version, 1.13.5, came out earlier this week. “We are currently working on version 2.0, which will have some new features and make it possible for users to develop their own plugins. We are also doing a lot of internal work in the application to improve its quality and performance.” Arada does his Java development using Swing and the Eclipse IDE.
“We have not yet decided on a date for 2.0 but we hope to release it early in 2010. In the meanwhile we we’ll continue releasing 1.13.x, including new fixes. Normally we release minor versions with new features every two months, but since we are working on a new major version now we need more time.”
Aranda says help with the project is always welcome from both translators and developers. “I personally would like to add some new ‘permanent’ developers to the team. In our Contributions page there is information about how to become a member of the team.”
To promote aTunes, the project announces new releases in sites like freshmeat. Some of its users have also created groups in social networks like Last.fm and Facebook.