Windows users have a lot of alternatives to the "mainstream" media players (Windows Media Player and iTunes). However, Mac OS users are not so fortunate. Aside from a couple of minor exceptions, Mac OS is an iTunes-dominated platform.
And as such, it means support for portable media players that don't have an "i" at the beginning of their name is scarce.
Mac users who carry a smartphone other than an iPhone or a media player other than an iPod don't exactly have the easiest time organizing and shifting their content from their computer to their mobile device.
It's part of the problem I talked about last December, when I wrote about the three main issues that have prevented smartphones from completely replacing dedicated personal media players like the iPod.
Among the three issues of limited battery life, limited storage capacity, and limited sync options, I consider sync to be the most important; and for Mac users, syncing a device other than an iPod or iPhone is really not an option.
Today, Instinctiv launched the beta of a new media player for Mac OS which takes a serious stab at remedying this problem.
The Instinctiv personalized media player supports portable devices that iTunes doesn't --such as those running Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian-- while supporting more than 50 file formats, including Windows Media files and those protected by Apple's FairPlay DRM.
This software is specifically geared toward Mac users who want to sync a device other than an iPod or iPhone.
"This market isn't just underserved, it's completely ignored!" Instinctiv CEO Aniq Rahman told us yesterday. "Apple has always given exclusive priority to their own products, but 85% of the international smartphone share is non-Apple devices. We're trying to cater to everybody, so they can sync all their devices with their Macs."
But the software isn't just meant to be a sync solution, it's also a standalone player that automatically fetches missing cover art, renames misspelled or untagged songs, lets users create playlists, and analyzes the user's listening behavior in shuffle mode with the company's smart shuffle technology which it first debuted as an iPhone app last year.
"Smart shuffle really eliminates the need to create playlists," Rahman said. "With the standard, random shuffle feature of media players, users skip every 1.5 songs. With iTunes Genius-enabled shuffle, users skip once every four songs. With Instinctiv shuffle, users skip once every 31 songs."
Instinctiv's smart shuffle can do a seeded shuffle which generates songs in a fashion similar to Pandora, or it can hone results as you go, based upon what you skip. For example, if you're not in the mood to listen to the fast and loud song that comes up in shuffle, you'll skip it and be given a song of a different mood.
Furthermore, Instinctiv is clean, small and purpose-oriented. As iTunes continues to grow into a solution for organizing all media -- music, HD video, apps, and now books -- it is turning into a pretty big piece of software. If you only want to organize and consume music, Instinctiv is a streamlined solution to do so. It can act as a standalone player and manager for all of your music files or as a companion to iTunes, with automatic support for playlists created in iTunes.
To download the beta of Instinctiv for Mac OS X 10.5+, visit Instinctiv's download site.
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