doubleTwist to Compete with iTunes Music Store using Amazon MP3s

Posted 10/07/2009 at 12:45pm | by Bart Sailsbury

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In what most likely is a nonevent, the media management company doubleTwist last week introduced the standalone application doubleTwist, which provides access to Amazon’s MP3 downloads. Billed as an iTunes competitor, doubleTwist will allow you to download music and, just like you can if you downloaded at Amazon or Lala or most other online music providers, put them on any device capable of playing MP3s--including an Apple iPod. Wow!

doubleTwist has an iTunes-familiar interface. You can download music (only music, and only from Amazon), but doubleTwist will allow you to manage your music, photos, and movies (which doubleTwist cleverly snatches from your iTunes library). The interface is familiar to iTunes users, but definitely more utilitarian.

A strength of doubleTwist may be its ability to manage your media on a variety of devices, such as the Palm Pre, BlackBerry, the Amazon Kindle, the Sony PSP, and Windows Media devices. But, alas, iPod/iPhone support is only available for Windows users at present. doubleTwist claims to transcode your files to the necessary format before loading to a mobile device.

The market for online music delivery is definitely heating up, with Microsoft’s streaming music venture in the UK, and the impending entry of Spotify into the United States. Given that most existing services are web-based (including Amazon’s), it’s not clear how attractive a machine-based alternative will prove.

Image Credit: doubleTwist