14 DAY TRIAL // There are players and players, virtually meant or suitable for anyone, from the simplest up to the most complex ones, offering from basic play-pause-stop to DVD-rip/burn options, online radio, tag editors and so on. Now, today I won't tell you about such pieces of code; instead I will review for you one truly simple player, whatever point of view you might consider.
The JaMP Player is by far one of the simplest and most basic proofs that a player needs not to be necessarily fancy and complex to do a good job. As a matter of fact, for the small occasional needs the JaMP Player might be one of the premium choices if we consider its class.
The Looks. The Works. The Fun.
This player is so simple and so un-sophisticated that it is rather uncanny for me to write extensively about it. First of all, it can take whatever shape you want or need: from a small window up to the full size of your monitor screen, the JaMP Player can go everywhere - too bad the Win native maximize button does not work so you'll have to click and drag the window to the desired aspect.
The JaMP Player is as Windows as the Win Explorer itself: no schemes for color variation and definitely no skins are available for this player - it will take whatever color-scheme and shape your operating system has so at this chapter I can't really speak about design or too much of a creative process; making a small window in Windows and also making it look as the OS does isn't such a creative act, I guess you'll agree with me.
The cool thing is that the playlist is dockable, meaning you can "show" or "hide" it depending on needs or wish; combining this option with the absolute freedom as far as the size and aspect of the whole player is concerned will give you unlimited possibilities for adjusting the way your desktop looks like.
There are 2 different regions in the JaMP Player: the upper part houses the minimalist playback control buttons, the rather rudimentary and imprecise seekbar, the volume slider and the playback mode-selector. I mentioned the "minimalist" because there are only 3 buttons: one for play/pause, a next and a previous ones; in fact just enough for what was the player intended for! The seekbar wasn't by any means meant for delicate and precise seeking inside a track and that's a fact: if you are to seek, don't seek with mouse and seekbar! The JaMP Player can operate in the Loop, Shuffle and Repeat modes so it behaves like any other big-name players.
One thing I wasn't really expecting in such a simple and straightforward software was the full and trouble-free support for multiple files and/or multiple folders drag and drop; so simple and so convenient - select what you want to load in the playlist, drag them on the player, drop them and hit play! The JaMP Player is so integrated in the operating system that it even uses the "properties" windows from it so no embedded tag editing but the simple file renamer and detail editor from Windows.
Administering the playlist is one easy task as it can also be done by means of Add, Clear and Sort buttons; selecting multiple items for deletion or reordering is very easy as the player is capable of understanding the mouse. And if we are at the mouse chapters, operation of the JaMP Player can be made also with mouse gestures and custom key combinations, all user-defined.
Unfortunately, there is no system tray icon and this would have made the JaMP Player even better and more XP than anything else. The supported file formats aren't that many but remember that no one said JaMP Player was a media center: nevertheless MP3, WMA, OGG and RM should cover about all when it comes to playing the audio content you might have stored on your PC.
The JaMP Player will save the playlist you've created in its own format, namely the *.lst and the user can switch between some 2 "sample" lists. Finally, two more things related to the way the JaMP Player looks: besides the convenient always on top option, this nice little player sports even variable transparence for both the main window and the playlist! For an installation size less than 1.5 MB, I guess this is one cool feature to be comprised!
The Good
I must admit I have grown to like the JaMP Player quite a lot because it truly is one of the best players in its class: small, painfully simple and with absolutely nothing futile in it. And, ah, working very well!
The Bad
The only recommendation I'd like to make is related to the system tray icon minimization option and a possible EQ in the future versions. That would be awesome!
The Truth
I don't know about the real truth; but my truth when it comes to the JaMP Player is that in its category it really rocks! An Excellent award from me, wholeheartedly.
I hope the screenshots below will convince you to at least try it:
