14 DAY TRIAL // Usually, when people say "minimal" or "minimalist", they actually think not of "as low as possible" but rather about "not that much as I'd like to for proper comfort". Well, as I ran the MJ Player, I instantly learned new meanings for "minimal". As well, I have seen that players can be made for fun only, because I could not really see a strong point in the creation of the MJ Player, other than proving that it's possible. As an exercise, it is pretty well but judging in strict terms of functionality and GUI, I'd rather say that MJ Player isn't almost at all.
The GUI. The Works. The Minimum.
The fact that this player has something that reminds of a GUI seemed pure luck as I first opened this application. MJ Player has a very Windows-look, a very Windows 98 look even; the classic grey background and generic OS-appearance, with square buttons and 16-colors design. I guess you have already thought that this GUI is also a small one: well, it really is and in fact, it does not display almost anything you may expect from a music player nowadays.
The main (and only) window is an approximately 520 by 100 pixels GUI with fixed aspect and which will not hide to the system tray; luckily, the taskbar item has a nice icon and displays the name of the currently playing song. In this window have been placed all the constitutive elements of the MJ Player's interface: the playback control buttons, the seek bar and the areas which display text on artist/song and playing times. Something more compact yet easily accessible could definitely be hard to build; the transport controls have square, grey buttons with bright colored symbols on them: green for Play, red for Stop and Record, blue for Skip forward/back and black for FFW and REW. Too bad that the fast forward and rewind buttons have rather misleading signs on them...
The seekbar looks very old and the text/info are not displayed in dedicated screens as it usually happens with other similar softwares: it is just directly placed on the grey background thus having much chances to pass unnoticed as it may seem that it is player-related text and not track-info. Nevertheless, this amount of text is quite satisfactory as it will tell you not only the artist and song's names but also the album, if such data is available. Even more, the time it displays gives info on totally played time out of the total length of the playlist and as well, the time elapsed out of the currently playing track.
Finally, the repeat mode is triggered by ticking a "Loop" checkbox; the shuffle-like mode is activated when pressing a rather strange looking button with an exclamation mark on it... The last button I'll be writing about is the Show Info/FreeDB: when playing anything else than CDA, pressing this button will display the Windows Properties for the current file; when running an audio CD, this button will attempt to retrieve data regarding the specific disc and display it.
The sound in MJ Player isn't bad but still rather far from a very good one. I was completely annoyed by the constant cracks and pops I kept hearing as I was moving the cursor back and forth in the seekbar and this is why I am sure I won't play anything in MJ Player again. The absence of shortcuts may have not been that painful should at least a volume bar be present in the GUI: tough luck - to set the volume, you have to either use the media key (which I don't have) or use the Windows' volume commands, which totally suck when we are speaking about a player. You just simply can't build up a music player with no volume control!
The MJ Player will handle some video files as well but I could not manage to have the image in full screen, so I dropped the issue rather quickly. Of course the video files format support is not extensive at all but I really don't think there will be many of you who will stand working with MJ Player for a long time... The playlist is not visually accessible at all since it is merely a virtual playlist and not a physical one - this makes working with MJ Player a lot harder if you plan to load many tracks and listen to them in any other order than their "natural" one...
The Good
The best things about MJ Player are the small size and the fact that it runs on very decent system resources.
The Bad
There are a lot of imperfections in this version of the MJ Player and I will definitely not enumerate them here... The worst thing though was the absence of both volume bar and volume controls.
The Truth
In the end, I'll repeat what I had said in the first lines: as a programming exercise, the MJ Player is a pretty good achievement but if we consider it among the players to be used at home...I'd better stop here.
Please see the screenshots below:
