Sometimes I feel like iTunes is a little bit too demanding on system resources, it happends to me from time to time that I start feeling my Mac a little bit slow and then I check my ActivityMonitor.app and iTunes is eating up to 1.5GB of my RAM (out of my 4GB :P) that’s alot of memory for a simple music player. After surfing the net for a nice solution I came across Ecoute.

Ecoute seems to me a really nice lightweit music player, the first thing that I like about Ecoute is that it plays your music right out of your iTunes library so you don’t have to manage 2 librarys when syncing with your iPod/iPhone, I liked that since you only have to download this 3.9MB app unzip it, open and you are ready to go.

This app also has some nice interface features that I found fascinating. The first one I’d like to talk about is that it looks and behaves just like and iPod touch interface, you have a listing of your songs and you can browser them by Song, Artist, Album and they are sorted alphabetically, you can even rate your songs quickly.

The second thing I liked about it’s interface is that while you are playing a song you get this nice cover-album art instead of the song listing just like in the iPod.

What I’m implying here is that if you are familiar with an iPod touch you are really going to feel comfortable with Ecoute since it’s usability is quite the same as the ipod touch.

The third feature about Ecoute that I like is that it’s integrated with Growl and when a new song is playing it displays a Growl notification so you know what song is currently playing, and not only that it also adds a nice cover-album art player to your desktop wallpaper so you can change your song straight from your desktop. That’s nice specially when working with multiple spaces.

It also integrates search capabilitys and an menu which stays on the top bar so you can easily change the song, however what I consider to be the Killer feature is that it allows you to set Keyboard shortcuts, as you might guess I’m more of a keyboard person and I really like having all the work done without the use of my mouse and Ecoute allows you to easily set keyboard shortcuts to to display the player window, go to next song, play/pause,Mute/unmute and search. I really like this feature since I believe is something that iTunes is missing.

Lastly.fm but not least 😛 it also has Last.fm integration so you can scrobble your plays 🙂 so If you like scrobbling this app would be a 2 in 1 ! yaaay! more free RAM for us RAM lovers.

And the best of all you can download Ecoute and give it a try for free, the licence is only 10 Dlls which for me is a cheap price to pay for such a good quality app. So point your browsers at http://www.ecouteapp.com/ and give it a try, you have nothing to loose 🙂