Sonique

Back in the early 2000s, choices in terms of audio players were limited to just a few alternatives. Winamp was everyone’s favorite, seconded by Sonique, a capable, reliable and good-looking player designed to transform your time into high-quality music.

Sonique attracts through aesthetics, as well as the wide array of output visualization modes and the rich audio control sets that include pitch/balance adjusting and band equalizers. It’s an easy-to-use, fully customizable audio player that doesn’t disappoint.

During a brief and colorful installation, Sonique prompts you to tick recognized file associations and offers to deploy (optionally) a few audio plugins for CD Support or WMA filters.

Sonique features an awesome interface with eye-catching skins and color patterns, while maintaining a sense of professionalism in the area of functionality.

Audio support includes MP3, OGG, CDA, WMA, XPL, PLS, M3U and WAV formats; not to mention that it can also play audio CDs. On the other hand, even though labeled as an audio player, Sonique is also capable to play AVI and MPG files.

Other features of Sonique include a full featured playlist editor and fully animated menus, extensive skin support, audio and visual plugin support, an integrated AE4 Mpeg Audio Decoder, and powerful audio controls (e.g. pitch, balance).

While testing Sonique, we were impressed by its looks and potential. Unfortunately, Sonique’s development halted somewhere in 2002 and was never resumed. Even though it seems like an old player, its set of features together with the look and feel beg to differ.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Sonique represented a stepping stone, amongst others, for most modern media players available today. It still manages to get the job done well, representing a proper alternative in case you decide to try something different.