14 DAY TRIAL // In order to get your hands on a little share of the market, one software producer must either come up with something new or bring something not-that-new but working very fine. Needless to say that some manage to do so and some won't be able to deliver any of these; while some will create altogether good software, there are some others who will be almost forced to make compromises, not all the time for the better. And when it comes to such an immense market as the music players' one, the battle is even fiercer than you'd expect: players appear and fade away each passing week and few get to make their name well known. Well, between those who ?stay? and those who ?go? there is another category which comprises programs yet ?not decided?: it is most likely that they will never make it to the top yet they refuse to ?die?.
I guess that MicroPlayer, the piece of code I am going to tell you about in the following lines belongs to this category: never a celebrity yet not offering to a (very often merciless) reviewer like me the reasons to ?kill? it. Let's see what and especially why...
The Looks
When I first read ?micro? in the name, I thought this was another of those ?almost no GUI? softwares, and even in case it had some interface, it would be very small and pretty much ? futile. Well, it simply wasn't so because MicroPlayer had indeed a much more serious interface with nice appearance and well endowed with cool things, rarely seen in ?micro?-type players. As a matter of fact, I guess that the developers called it ?micro? just because they did not over-burdened it with all sorts of features, useful or not, as we see in many similar programs each day.
MicroPlayer has a main window and a series of additional windows which are docked in it: while the main houses the playback control buttons, the settings and other devices' buttons, the volume and seek bars and the text-data regarding the tracks that are played at a certain time, the other windows are dedicated to the EQ, Playlist, About, Settings and ID. A very nice thing was that all these separated windows looked alike and had the same dimensions as the main one so the whole visual appearance was very tidy and good-looking.
The background of the MicroPlayer resembles much to the polished aluminum-type, except that it is colored in a very light blue shade and the shape is neat, clean and rectangular. All buttons are very simple and have only the classical markings; one interesting thing was that MicroPlayer does not display hints and tags as you hover the mouse over buttons ? instead, the corresponding text is shown in the main window.
This main window actually displays a lot of data: from artist and track name to the system time (very cool and useful thing!, elapsed/remaining and total playing time, bitrate and frequency and a VU-meter which did not work at all and I could not make it work whatsoever. Finally, one thing about the GUI of MicroPlayer is that it also shows the position in the playlist in a #-all format, namely ?#? for the current song's number in the playlist and ?all? for the number of tracks in there.
The Works
Before I say anything, I have to mention that MicroPlayer will play only MP3 files; this is rather peculiar because a software with such potential could have very well embedded support for so many of the popular audio formats! Well, if this is what its developers wanted, it's clearly not for me to judge, but simply just name my confusion.
Having passed over this issue, I have to say that despite the ?micro?-thing, this software has a lot of features I was not at all expecting to meet. A 10-band EQ working form -12dB so +12dB and with 4 presets (not exactly what I thought of choosing), always on top and repeat, screensaver and decoder priority as well as a very simple to use ID tag editor. Could all these (and even more) be features of a ?micro? player? Looks like they are and this means only good things.
MicroPlayer supports multiple file drag and drop (and not folders) that will ease the way you work with this player. It looks to me more and more that this particular software is a ?micro? for a very heavily-loaded program; custom EQ, tag editor, everything is as intuitive as possible and anyone could learn its way with MicroPlayer even if it's one of the very first encounters. Too bad that the VU-meters don't work, this could have been a very nice thing especially that the channels were separated!
Luckily, the shortcuts work just fine and MicroPlayer is quite responsive to them; the always on top can be really annoying sometimes and the lack of a tray icon is direly felt. The MicroPlayer has some minimized mode but it sucks a lot: the player is replaced by a floating tag which is even more annoying as it doesn't display any info but a ?MicroPlayer 2.1? text... truly nasty! Otherwise, MicroPlayer could have been an a lot more ?friendly? player by making the playlist expandable and not with fixed size as it is now thus allowing a far better perspective on what's ?cooking?.
Unfortunately, there isn't much more to say about this exclusively MP3-playing program. Once more, I can't say why only MP3 files are supported and not even why the raw WAV format can't run it... It is definitely not a bad program and this isn't just because that, despite the ?micro? feature ? it is quite loaded with other stuff but because this is the truth: it may be a bit hard to use on your home PC since it will only play MP3, but also taking account that it's a freeware source...things do not look so grim anymore. Even if MicroPlayer may not be the player to replace Winamp or Foobar, I still liked it!
The Good
It's free, it's light on the system resources, it has an EQ and tag editor, almost everything you need to run your MP3 in good conditions.
The Bad
The worst thing is that MicroPlayer will work only with MP3 files and instead of being able to run in the system tray, it will rather work in always on top mode only.
The Truth
As said before, it is very unlikely that MicroPlayer will take over something at all; nevertheless, it remains the same very nice piece of software. Give it a try - you?ll enjoy it!
And now, the snapshots:
