Alambic - Turn on the Alambic, enjoy your music !

The Alambic Project

Alambic is yet another music player. Why a new music player, since there are already bunch of them? Well, we started this project because we did not find any good music player on a Windows platform. In our opinions, Windows Media Player has a fancy look, but is not intuitive. iTunes is not better, with it's strange way of browsing into the music collection. Winamp is obsolete. And Songbird did not convince us. All the others music players that we tested were more or less Winamp-like players.

The best music player that we found is Amarok, but it only runs on Linux. We took it as a model when we first started to design Alambic, and since then we got some innovative ideas, which could improve the user experience.

Alambic is intended to be very user-friendly, without complicated menus (as you can see on the picture below), nor windows everywhere. However, it will include nice features, like lyrics, smart playlists or context information, available with a cool look in order to provide a great user experience ! Check the Features for more information !

In order to realize this project, we are using C# and Xaml, with the .NET Framework 3.0 and especially WPF (Windows Presentation Framework). This powerful technology allows us to quickly add new features, and to build the Graphical User Interface easily and efficiently.

Why "Alambic" ?

An Alambic (Alembic, or still in English) is an apparatus used to distill miscible or immiscible (eg. steam distillation) liquid mixtures by heating to selectively boil and then cooling to condense the vapor. Stills have been used to produce perfume and medicine, Water for Injection (WFI) for pharmaceutical use, generally to separate and purify different chemicals, and most famously, to produce distilled beverages containing ethyl alcohol. - Wikipedia

We called this project Alambic, because it is meant to provide you the best of your music by removing the boring parts (browsing to find your music, searching the lyrics or information about the artist, ...), just like a still removes compounds from the alcohol that would make it unpleasant to drink.

You can help !

Alambic is an Open-source project, and will be available under the LGPL license. We believe in the open-source philosophy, which allows anyone to look at the source code,  understand how it works, give ideas and improvements, or modify whatever one wants in order to make the software more suitable for his purposes. Everybody can contribute, even you ! No need to be a skilled developer, you can help in other ways. For instance, you can provide:

• Translations
• Ideas: the cool features that you would like to have in your music player
• Artwork: logos, splash screens, wallpapers...
• Mockups: submit GUI samples
• Bug and crash reports 

Everything will be greatly appreciated ! If you want to help, you can check:

• Alambic development HOWTO: http://alambic.eclyps.info/?q=node/1
• Alambic developers forum: http://alambic.eclyps.info/forum