Written by Tom Wilkason

SnackAmp is a multi-platform music player with normal music player abilities, multi-user support, integrated web server, and a powerful AutoPlaylist feature. Currently mp3, wav, ogg vorbis, and many other sound files are supported. SnackAmp also plays mp3 and ogg streams and can act as a Icecast/Shoutcast compatible server for other stream clients. Both auto-leveling (normalization) and gapless playback are supported. Tcl/Tk scripts and stand-alone executables (for Windows and Linux) are available from sourceforge.

The motivation behind SnackAmp was to overcome the deficiency in other media players to manage tens of thousands of mp3/ogg files in a powerful and easy to use manner. Although a database is used to track files by their metadata, SnackAmp allows you to organize your files in a familiar directory structure allowing you maximum freedom without having to change each tag to display the files in a certain way.

SnackAmp runs on a number of platforms and has a simple installation process requiring download of a single file. Being open source and written Tcl/Tk, the best scripting language around, you can change it to suite your needs. SnackAmp includes the wonderful Snack 2.2.9 Sound toolkit written and maintained by Kåre Sjölander.

SnackAmp main gui playing in compact mode, click image to see expanded mode.

SnackAmp 3.1.3 latest beta.

SnackAmp desktop running on Linux/KDE

What makes SnackAmp different?

1. SnackAmp has a media manager like many players, however it does NOT use the metadata to organize the tracks. It uses a simple folder tree that matches your directory structure allowing you to organize the tracks (and files) any way you see fit. SnackAmp does read the metadata from the tracks allowing to modify and search by tags as well as tools for moving your tracks around within the folder structures.
2. Autoplaylists. Once you have your folders organized, typically with each end folder containing an album worth's of tracks, you can select individual folders from within the AutoPlaylist manager, and save the selected folders as an AutoPlaylist . You can later apply that AutoPlaylist to the main playlist, sorting the tracks anyway you see fit. I would typically have AutoPlaylist of different types of music and shuffle them subsorting by last played time then play count. This way I don't here the same tracks very often.

Although many recent mp3 and song to be ogg files support ID3 tags, it is very cumbersome to tag your files and organize them by genre, artist or some other consistent manner. I like ID3 tags, and SnackAmp has powerful built-in tools for managing them, however I still find it easier organize the files by folders and sub-folders using SnackAmp. SnackAmp, unlike other music juke-boxes, was built with this in mind. I use the AutoPlaylist to set the folders that I want to listen to based on taste.

Unless you are on Windows or Linux (which have distributions containing either single executable SnackAmp files or 2.2.9 snack engine files), you must have the snack 2.2.8 or later extensions installed on you machine. The snack engine can be found at http://www.speech.kth.se/snack/download.html.

The latest version of SnackAmp can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/snackamp/ under the file releases. You can also get the CVS sources at http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/snackamp/snackamp/

Please see the readme file for installation and other news for the current version.

SnackAmp is free software, both in terms of "free-speech" and "free-beer".

What is doesn't have

• Banner adds or spyware
• Annoying Registration
• Large footprint on your system.
• Skins (Although you can customize the look and feel)
• High CPU usage
• Visualizations

Things To Do

• Additional features for web interface
• Built-in Podcast downloading and database updates

Credits

• Snack 2.2 - Kare Sjolander
• tkdnd - Georgios Petasis
• tkimg - Jan Nijtmans
• MemChan - Andreas Kupries
• Starkits & Metakit - Jean-Claude Wippler
• Tablelist - Dr. Csaba Nemethi
• tkTree - Dr. Richard Hipp - <drh@acm.org> http://www.hwaci.com/drh/
• Winico - Leo Schubert, Brueckner&Jarosch Ing. <leo@bj-ig.de>
• Collapsable Frame - William J Giddings
• Linux Testing and UI ideas - Laurent Duperval & Heinz-Dieter Conradi
• Denis Ballant for removable media idea.
• Pane widget - Jeffrey Hobbs
• Adrian Davis - Additional Icons
• Martin Lemburg - 3.0 early feedback and many great ideas
• Dag Wieers - Provides RPM and great ideas for web jukebox interface
• Wojciech Kocjan - Micro interface on web server for symbian phones and patch to support remote control user access.
• Konstantin Levinski - Tips to maintain UTF encoding in tags.
• Leslie Brooks - Tree View changes for reusability.
• Gerson Perru - Custom Genres idea

Many thanks to the fantastic folks at for hosting SnackAmp and other open source software.