Tray Media Player

Media players are commonly used for offline playback, with a large variety of available options. Some put emphasis on comfort, while others expand the set of features with a wide range of visual and functional tweaks. A combination of both is Tray Media Player, which mostly sits in the tray area so you can enjoy all the desktop space.

One of the application’s main requirements is .NET Framework, but modern Windows iterations come with it as a default feature, so chances are it’s already there. On the other hand, it skips you the whole effort of going through a setup process, and can be easily carried around on a thumb drive to use on other computers besides your own.

As the name might suggest, the application spends most of its time in the tray area. A rich menu is at your disposal, containing playback controls, playlist selection options, and possibility to configure general behavior.

By default, the application is set to read M4A, MP2, MP3, and WMA files. You’re free to add your own, but you need to make sure proper codecs are installed on your computer. You can take the time to create a playlist, or simply add one or more directories for the application to automatically read, and play from there.

Configuring a playlist can be a bit of a hassle. Although looks pretty simple, and it is, the application most of the times refuses to save it, or even display in the playlists menu. Even closing the playlist editor and bringing it back up discards all changes.

Playback controls are handled from the tray menu, but clicking the tray icon also works by toggling status. Related controls are used to loop the entire playlist, and pick items at random. In case you’re not really interested in offline files, a built-in component can be used to listen to radio streams over the web by providing a target URL.

All things considered, we can say that Tray Media Player might not really be what you expected to find, although it’s pretty easy to handle overall. However, the faulty playlist manager has the greatest impact on practicality, and even though playback is toggled with ease from the tray menu, it could have used hotkey support in this regard.