14 DAY TRIAL // Although video and audio media revolves around them, media players today no longer receive the attention they used to. It is true that formats now ask for more elaborate solutions to support them, but a clean, simple to use and free media player will always be sought as an alternative.
Style Jukebox is new on the market, so new that its first beta has just been published today, and comes at no cost at all, except for the system resources it requires to function properly. Windows Presentation Foundation was used to build the application so it shares similarities in aspect with the current Windows Media Player.
The app is designed as a full featured media player that supports all popular formats of video and audio content at the same time offering an easy to use environment. It installs without fuss, with no event out of the ordinary.
Style Jukebox automatically detects all removable devices connected to the system allowing you to access media content on them. Scanning goes fast, but its completion also depends on the amount of data available on the device. As soon as it finishes, the app shows all content it discovered at the same time displaying information such as total duration, album name and rating, only if such details are available.
Creating your own library does not require too much effort from your part. Add files, entire folders or URLs. The list of supported video is quite extensive, comprising all popular video, audio and playlist formats: AVI, MPG, VOB, MKV, MOV, WMV, MP3, OGG, WAV, WMA, FLAC, AC3, PLS, M3U. We encountered no difficulties when playing audio and video files, but PLS format would not be decoded.
The options for removing items from the library let you get rid of the entire playlist or eliminate only selected items. Another option, called Smart Remove, lets you pick the items sharing the same bit of text, which can be the name of the artist, of the album or year of launch. You can view all detected items in order to check that everything is OK and choose which should be kicked out. This is one intelligent way to remove multiple items with common tags fast and easy.
Style Jukebox comes with support for multiple playlists, a feature that grants you the chance to organize your music and videos just the way you like it. Also, toggling between the various playlists is an easy task because all of them are within easy reach, in the upper part of the application window. What is truly beautiful about the media management is that each playlist has separate audio and video sections and you can easily switch between them. Simply drop the files in the desired playlist and they are separated in an instant according to their content.
Folder Watch is another feature in Style Jukebox that adds value to the application. As its name suggests, its purpose is to synchronize the items in a folder with the library of the program. This way, all the changes you make to that folder will be mirrored in Style Jukebox library. On the downside, this applies only to the default playlist of the program. A nice touch would be to have the possibility to assign folder monitoring for each of the playlists created.
Although Style Jukebox comes off as an over simplified media player, the developer makes available an equalizer to give you a chance to tweak the sound to your preferences. It is nothing complicated, but features 10 bands and lets you save presets of your EQ settings in order to load them later in the program. The discomfort created is that the preset is not automatically saved in the program’s installation folder, so that it is accessible at all times.
There are plenty of media players out there and creating a new one is definitely a tough job. Yet Style Jukebox managed to implement some cool, simple and useful features in an interface that requires almost no effort to navigate. There are no settings to be made, which renders everything extremely comfortable for a beginner, but you have to get your own codecs. Fortunately, the app guides you through this and recommends downloading and installing the k-lite codec pack for the decoding job.
Being in beta stage, Style Jukebox still has plenty of issues to fix (and maybe features to add), but the worst we experienced was the unexpected crashing of the program when we tried to close it. It also happened to crash during simple operations such as adjusting the view.
The Folder Watch feature present in plenty of professional audio players is also available in Style Jukebox. It allows you to synchronize a folder on the disk with the Library section in the application. Smart Remove is another plus in the program, as it enables easy finding of multiple items with the same tag and eliminate them in bulk instead of hunting them down one by one.
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