Quintessentialness

What's Inside

Quintessential goodness comes to those who wait. I am one of those who waited a bit too long though, since Quintessential Media Player has been out on the net for a while now. I've always been a Winamp user who's just interested in the simplicity and practicality of listening to music while doing almost anything on my computer.

I need music and I'll choose the best player in order to appease my musical cravings. Let's see if QMP can make the list.

Some Goodies

In a way, I was the fortunate fool in this review since QMP opened my eyes to the things I've been missing. This program does most of the things you look for in any media player. It plays, encodes, visualizes and performs like any professional media player. But it has a few more tricks up its sleeve.

Contrast to Winamp, it doesn't automatically associate every audio/video file type to play with the associated player. QMP starts off by associating audio file types and offers you the chance to change them later on.

Quintessential Media Player's fan base comes from its option to let you choose between tons of different skins. Yes I know Winamp does the same thing, but QMP has a slight edge in this category.

It incorporates skin choosing as a part of the application. No more surfing the net to see what's new and what's good. Instead, you just go right in your options menu and click away to your heart's content until you find your perfect fit.

You can sort by when a skin was last updated, its ranking, size, and finally you can sort by the skin's author. In any case, it lets you color coat, contrast, change, switch, tweak and mess around with your skins a lot more than Winamp? but I think in overall selection, both programs are pretty tied.

The sound quality from QMP was a bit surprising because it was in fact a little better compared to some other players I've used. It has good plug-ins that give it the extra boost it needs for its great audio performance.

I certainly liked QMP's option of setting my 'Watch folders'. This function automatically monitors specified folders and updates your playlist accordingly. If you're constantly downloading while surfing the net, you don't have to worry about nitpicking at your playlist, but instead let it automatically update.

I didn't like the fact that a song would blink whenever a track was playing, luckily this was an option I could easily turn off in the preference menu. Overall it's well-organized and ad-free; QMP handles formats like Ogg Vorbis, an open-source alternative to MP3. It lets you add tons of visualizers, library functions, DSP filters, language packs, and other plug-ins to extend the player's capabilities. QMP also lets you rip CDs, encode MP3s, use cross-fading, and access the CDDB via integrated functions.

The Good

It's got everything you want from a good player. Audio wise, it performs splendidly, it encodes beautifully and appears marvelously.

The Bad

Slightly bogs a little when you copy music, but that could have just been my computer.

The Truth

You should snap, crackle and pop your way to downloading this program and definitely give it a shot. For Winamp users out there, it can definitely compete and it might even offer you some functions that you're not accustomed to. This review definitely falls short when including the amount of features that QMP fully includes, but we at Softpedia definitely recommend you try the Quintessential Player out.

Check out some pics below.