Jaangle is the new TeenSpirit. Our wonderful programme author, Alex, has made changes to TeenSpirit as a result of user requests and his own imagination and these changes are bundled up into the brilliant Jaangle. You will also now find a wiki help section for Jaangle so if there is anything you want to know take a look there.

Jaangle is a very nice music and video player I had heard about Jaangle/TeenSpirit (TS) a while ago but thought it was just like all the rest. Silly me. I was setting up a spare computer to use as a jukebox when we have visitors of all ages and I wanted a programme that was easy to understand and use. I want visitors to be able to easily locate a song and queue it up but I also want it to keep playing random songs if no one has added to the queue. Several years ago I tried to find something to do this (for free of course) and downloaded many, many programmes of which none achieved what I wanted. Now I have found Jaangle which is perfect. Not just that I will be using it as my regular player on my pc.

Apart from playing most of the common music formats Jaangle will also play some video formats with the possibility that in the future .flv files will be included. Plenty of info is downloaded from the net for you by default but you can turn off any of this. Things like album art and artist biographies, artist pictures are downloaded but you can get lyrics with an easy right click on the song in the Track List. Jaangle comes with quite a few skins and if you don't like them you can make your own quite easily as I did. The screenshots below are showing Jaangle being used with the 3 skins I created

Jukebox


Aussie


XP Blue

When you first open Jaangle it will ask you for the location of the files you want to add. You can update this or add more at any time by clicking the Collections menu button.

The files found will be shown in the top left pane sorted by artists with at least 3 titles by default but this can be changed. Clicking the round, silvery icon in the top left corner of any pane will give you access to other options. For this tree pane you can set different filters, sort by many tags, group and change the style of the pane. In my screenshots above I have it set to the new Style 7 however there are 6 other styles most of which allow for viewing album art.

When you click on a listed item in the tree pane the contents will be shown in the top right pane, the tracklist, just like in windows explorer (By the way, these panes can now be moved to other positions). Select something in here and hit the backspace key and that song or video clip will be queued up to play next. Right clicking a file in tracklist gives you access to several options, one of which is properties which includes a basic tag editor which is really handy for fixing those incorrect tags. Right clicking the column headings lets you chose which columns you want to show. There are many more available than what I use.

So the current list of items are shown in the bottom left pane, the playlist. Here again you have several options to chose from.

Lastly we come to the visualization pane at the bottom right. You need to have this pane open to view video or see special info and there is even a browser window available from here.

One other thing I haven't mentioned (there are probably heaps of things actually) but there is a really handy search box at the top right of the screen which appears to search in every format. If I type in part of the name of a folder of music I know I have it will show me all the songs in that folder.

I also need to mention the game part. There is a fun little game where part of a song is played and you get to say which song it is out of a choice of 4, racing against the clock. The thing is, it will be a song from your own "library" so you are bound to know it. A great time waster :)

This programme is outstanding. All this packed into just over 2MB of download and just over 5MB when installed. It seems to use little system resources, it opens quickly and is just a delight to use. Thankyou Alex for sharing this with us.