Soft

Just so you don’t waste any time for simple things like previewing a video or audio file, Windows provides a default set of tools to serve in common tasks. Needless to say that later on you can browse the web for third-party alternatives, and Soft is one example in case you’re looking for a multimedia player.

It gets installed in the blink of an eye, and the last step of setup offers to launch it directly. As far as the visual design goes, the application keeps things simple, with a common window frame which mostly represents the preview area for the video or audio visualisation mode, and a slim set of controls which automatically hides when not used.

Adding files needs to be done through the browse dialog, which becomes visible once you slide up the set of playback controls. Sadly, dropping files over the window has no effect. Playback is limited to a file at a time, because there’s no built-in playlist editor to make long-term sessions easier to handle.

Owning a multimedia keyboard doesn’t really help here, and there are no hotkey alternatives to configure either. You’re strictly put up against a basic set of controls, although the volume slider can be increased to 200%, but audio quality has to suffer from a certain point on.

View controls let you zoom in and switch to fullscreen mode. Playback speed also benefits from several adjustment options, such as normal, slow, or fast. File properties can easily be accessed, and are presented in a similar manner to Windows Media Player.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that Soft is a pretty straightforward multimedia player, which doesn’t really offer much playback flexibility. Just make sure to have .NET Framework installed so you don’t run into any issues when taking it for a spin.