The Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) recently released Miro 4, a major new version of its open source media player. The new version introduces support for music library management and Android device synchronization—expanding Miro beyond its historical roots as a tool for consuming Internet video.

Miro was originally created in 2006 under the name Democracy Player with the aim of opening up video. Its creators hoped to use the power of the Internet to move beyond the top-down approach of traditional broadcasting. The application makes it easy for end users to consume Internet video content from a wide range of independent sources. The scope of the application has grown over the years, but the focus has largely remained on open technology and encouraging the growth of inclusive content ecosystems.

The new version is sort of positioned as an iTunes for Android. It will allow you to manage your media library and sync your content with an Android device. It can even convert your video to the appropriate format and resolution so that it will be able to play on your Android-based device. It also offers basic support for browsing Google's Android Market website and Amazon's Android Appstore from within the application.

I installed Miro 4.0 on a Mac Pro running Snow Leopard so I could see how it compares to alternatives. During the initial setup process, it gave me the option of importing my iTunes music library. This feature basically causes it to scan and monitor the default iTunes media location so that it can mirror the contents of your iTunes library.

Miro allows you to browse and play songs from your music library and make playlists. The biggest downside of using Miro as a music player is that the music browsing interface is very simplistic. You can sort by artist and album, but you can't filter it like you can do in iTunes or other similar music players. I can't just have it list the contents of a single album, for example: I have to scroll down to that album in a flat list of all my available tracks.

In addition to media-management and playback capabilities, Miro 4.0 also has support for network sharing. You can configure Miro to act as a media server so that other computers on the local network can stream or download audio and video content from your library. It uses the DAAP protocol so that you can optionally use other client applications besides Miro. An iPad application designed to stream content from a Miro server is under development, but it hasn't yet been officially released.

Like its predecessors, Miro 4.0 is a pretty good tool for video podcast enthusiasts. The new music management functionality has some value, but is still a bit simplistic. The user interface really isn't well-suited for interacting with a music collection that has thousands of songs.

The Android device syncing experience in Miro still falls a bit short compared to doubleTwist, which is cleaner and more functional. It's also worth noting that Songbird, an open source audio player which has much richer music library management features than Miro, just recently got a powerful new two-way device synchronization framework.

With such good alternatives available, Miro's music management isn't really a major selling point. It could, however, be convenient for users who already rely on the application's extensive video functionality and don't want to have to deal with a separate piece of software for music syncing. Miro's music functionality might become more competitive in future versions as it matures.

Users can download Miro 4.0.1 from the project's website. It is available today for Windows and Mac OS X. It's supported on various flavors of Linux, but the packaging is largely maintained by the distros, so not all of them have updated binaries yet. Ubuntu users can get the latest version from a PPA. Tarballs are available for users who want to build it from source.