Why should I use Sonatina?

Well, I designed Sonatina to be small, unobtrusive, and to just work as one would expect it to do. Basically, I wrote it to make up for how large iTunes had become. There are other small music players for Mac OS X (such as Mike Kronenberg's PicoPlay), but none that worked the way I wanted. Basically, if you want a small, clean, open source music player for Mac OS X, then I hope that Sonatina can meet your expectations.


Features

In no particular order, here's some things that Sonatina has:

  • Plays standard formats, including .mp3 and .m4a
  • Is controllable from a status menu
  • Has a mini player that looks pretty good, if I must say so myself
  • Has built-in support for scrobbling to Last.fm
  • Can import an existing iTunes library
  • Its small (less than 2MB in total size even as a 3-architecture (PowerPC, x86, x86-64) Universal Binary)
  • Its extensible (plugins can be written to support additional file formats)
  • It uses less system resources than iTunes
  • Its free and open-source (licensed under the GNU GPL v2)

What's with the name?

Well, I was searching for a music-related word that would still imply the small size of what I was writing at the time. The first one that struck my fancy that wasn't already taken by another music player at the time was Sonatina. A sonatina, for those who don't know, is quite literally a small sonata (see: Sonatina on Wikipedia). Thus, I felt it would work quite well for the name of my program.