14 DAY TRIAL // I'd say that - when it comes to the Blaze TrayAudio - these could easily be the most misused $15 I could come across in the last two months. At first, I thought it was all about another nice music player on which I prepared myself to write a cute review; now, after more or less an hour spent in its rather ?not-so-pleasant? company (to be extremely polite, that is) I had serious doubts whether I should write something at all.
Not that I am already tired of trying to cope with Blaze TrayAudio's completely unsure and hesitating operation, but I am also thinking of what must be one thinking when asking 15 dollars on a player which works so lousy...
First, the looks. Then, the works. And then, the un-works.
To be honest, the default skin of Blaze TrayAudio does not look terrible at all: a rather fancy-techno look, with very nice background, all in a very pleasant ashy-grey except the playlist background, which is calmly green. All over this GUI ? round buttons with readable text and nicely-designed slider bars for volume, overall progress and balance make a really handsome and appealing picture. All menus - as poor as they might be and look - and the little info they contain are very easy to access and use.
Skins are downloadable on the dedicated website: from what I have seen there, many of them are just simple color-schemes and quite few can be properly named ?a skin?; I have downloaded and installed the ?kids? skin and it looked OK and functional, too bad the playlist was so small and there was absolutely no way to alter its size.
The Blaze TrayAudio would have had an almost square GUI if it hadn?t been for the Playlist button, which toggles the playlist visibility and which is placed just under the main command pane, in the left area of the window. When pressing these buttons, the playlist either hides or makes itself visible by means of a sliding animated movement; too bad it will never show the times of the tracks as they (both current and total) are displayed in a dedicated field. As I have unfortunately noticed, even if the Total time is displayed OK, the Current Time does not move from showing 00 00, and it is here where troubles begin in what the workings of the Blaze TrayAudio are concerned.
As I noticed that the elapsed time counter was dead, I watched the seekbar and also seen that it was dead as well: when I moved the cursor, the song playback changed accordingly, but - as I released the click-and-drag cursor - it remained fixed to the new position I had brought it; so far I had a seekbar and a counter which did not work...and more was to come...
I had also learned that, as one decides to play a song, this is about everything the Blaze TrayAudio can do: you can't convince the program to perform anything else as long as a track is being played; no double-click jump to another track ? you just have to stop playing what you were playing and then operate. Slow and dementing, this is how I would catalogue this manner of operating.
No file info (or ID3) editor available means that you can't really do many things with the Blaze TrayAudio, except playing some songs. And even when speaking about this, I just have to add that Blaze TrayAudio did not play audio CDs, which sucked big time: the producers said it does, but I could not hear a thing as I tried to make it play no less than 4 different audio CDs.
The shortcuts the Blaze TrayAudio specifies in a dedicated window were not working at all, not even the Exit command which should have run on the Ctrl+Alt+X hotkey-pressing. It is supposed that - especially when running in the minimized to system tray-mode - this kind of shortcuts should work and control the playback without the need to bring the player on-screen.
For me it seemed rather annoying that the ?Save playlist? window popped up at improper times, obviously slowing down the overall operation of the program. This playlist-frenzy makes me think that Blaze TrayAudio is rather a playlist-oriented music playing software than a file-based program; it looks to me like a not so good method to replicate the media library-type of similar programs.
I mentioned before something about the very poor menu-content of the Blaze TrayAudio; well, I won't change my opinion in what this content is concerned: Blaze Tray has its menus filled with highly unimportant data, especially if compared to what anyone could meet in similar applications. There are lots of crappy things that are really not helping almost anyone, such as regulating playlist position and the main window's position, and automatically sending the program to the system tray when playback is started. Come on, there are so many things with far more importance which should have been comprised in a music player! An EQ for example, would be far more useful than the Restore Default Skin menu.
Blaze TrayAudio starts looking good and ends up working very lousy; despite the fancy and very ordered GUI, Blaze TrayAudio has a very poor engine and even poorer possibilities in what letting the user configure and tweak sound is concerned.
The Good
The only good thing is the way Blaze TrayAudio looks. From classic default schemes to the funky ones, the GUIs are OK. But this is all.
The Bad
I won't be that bad as to enumerate here in detail what's wrong with Blaze TrayAudio, but instead, I'll simply name the things which annoyed me most: no EQ, no working shortcuts, no possibility to control the instances' number, no working counters and bars. The list could go on forever, but I guess I should stop here.
The Truth
A hell of a price for a software that does not run even half of the features usually met even in crappy freeware players. A definite ?DON'T EVER THINK ABOUT IT!?-tag from me. Sorry, but it is a bad piece of code. Pity the GUIs, for I liked them!
See the screenshots and - if you want to get nervous - try and use Blaze TrayAudio everyday...
