Miro is a cross-platform media player for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. It started out its life as Democracy Player, an app aimed at helping users organize and view video podcasts. But over the past few years it’s grown into a pretty capable audio and video player with support for local and online media playback.
It also features integration with online music stores from Amazon, Google, and eMusic and a podcast directory.
Today Miro released version 5 of the media player, with a few new features aimed at helping you keep your media organized.
Miro 5 has a feature that lets you automatically check tracks on your computer against and online database and correct song titles and other information. For instance, Track 1 can be renamed as the actual first track on an album, and “Unknown Artist” can be updated to show the actual band or artist.
The media player relies on information from Echonest and 7Digital, and to be honest it can be a bit hit or miss. I only added 2 albums to my Miro collection, and it failed to download album art for one album and decided it couldn’t name one of the songs in the list from a second.
Miro 5 also adds new device synchronization options, allowing you to automatically sync your media to a mobile device when it’s connected or to just fill a certain amount of space with newest, random, or other media depending on your settings.
Overall I’m not sure Miro is ready to replace Winamp, Media Monkey, or even Windows Media Player yet… it still feels a little rough around the edges. For instance, most of my media is on a shared network drive that Miro couldn’t recognize. I’d have to install Miro on my media Center PC and then install Bonjour in order to share music with my work PC.
But Miro does have a few features that you won’t find in many other apps including the integrated podcast directory, music stores, BitTorrent support, and a very impressive media conversion tool that includes a number of preset options and support for a wide range of audio and video formats.
Miro 5 is available as a free download from the Miro website.