DVD Jon, the reverse engineer who decrypted DVDs for the masses and liberated iTunes with DoubleTwist, is worried about the Android Market. There's too much junk, he says, and Google needs to follow Apple's lead to clean it up. More »

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doubleTwist, a company whose vision is “to create a unifying media platform that connects consumers with all their media and all their devices,” has just released a full-featured media player for your Android device. Sporting a very appealing UI, the new media player allows users to sync and update media from the doubleTwist desktop client (available for both Mac and PC) directly to their Android device. A new, and fairly huge, feature that the doubleTwist Android player packs is the ability to recognize metadata from an iTunes library. This gives long time users of iTunes — who don’t fancy the iPhone — a choice of media players and a legitimate exit strategy from iTunes. Users can change media players — while retaining the ability to sync seamlessly with a mobile device — and not give up playlist, song rating, and play count data accumulated over days, months, or years of iTunes. Go ahead and give the new doubleTwist Android media player a shot, and do let us know what you think.

NOTE: you can also checkout Songbird as a cross-platform iTunes alternative.

[Via LifeHacker]

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Cross-platform phone synchronization tool doubleTwist is adding some welcomed functionality to its flagship program by including support for Android’s Market. The new feature will allow users of doubleTwist to browse the latest Android Market offerings from within dT right on their desktop. It does, however, come with a “twist.” See what we did just there? The ability to download an Android app to your desktop and sync to your phone via USB — a la iTunes — is not an option. Instead, doubleTwist will display app QR codes which, when scanned by Android, will link your device directly to the Android Market’s page for the application in question. From there you know what to do: download, rinse, and repeat. doubleTwist is promising to implement over-the-air downloads sometime this summer in order to provide a more seamless experience. The new feature does come with a fairly annoying, albeit minor, limitation: you can’t sort applications by category or genre. The Market browsing feature is set to hit the Mac version of doubleTwist today and its Windows counterpart “soon.” A web directory of the Market has also been launched and can be found here: http://apps.doubletwist.com/. What are your thoughts?

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It's impossible not to love the concept of doubleTwist, the all-devices-welcome quasi-iTunes music manager, but up to this point the software has been pretty barebones. Now, things are gettin' ser-i-ous: doubleTwist has a built-in music store, courtesy of Amazon.

To put this into context, doubleTwist debuted not just as an alternative music manager for people with or without Apple players, but as a giant, coded jab at iTunes, Apple, and the way they do business. After launch, DVD Jon, who created doubleTwist, spent a few months waging a small-scale PR war, hanging Apple-baiting banners in San Francisco and parodying their famous "1984" ad. With Amazon MP3 store integration, that ad's promise—to "bring you choice"—has come true, and it's worth a thousand PR stunts

As has been the case with every other aspect of doubleTwist, the music storefront looks like a simpler version of the one in iTunes. Navigation and searching are about as simple as they could be, as are downloads, which only take a few clicks. The whole experience will be familiar to anyone weened on Apple's bloated beast, apart from a few things: Amazon's album prices are often lower than iTunes', and of course, you can immediately sync any music you download—there's only music, by the way—to practically any device you own, be it a Pre, a BlackBerry, a Sandisk, an iPod, or whatever.

The first version is Mac-only and tied to Amazon's US store, but Windows (and international) versions are on their way. [doubleTwist via Techcrunch]