Fastplayer

Taking a break after a long day’s work can simply mean listening to a song or two on your computer. If done offline, this requires a dedicated application to read the file type in question. It doesn’t need to be a complex tool if you want clean playback, and in this regard, Fastplayer might just suit your needs.

Even though you’re taken through a setup process, the application can be deployed on a thumb drive just as well, because it doesn’t have an impact on registry entries, so you can easily carry it with you wherever you go. This saves a great deal of time and effort, always letting you enjoy your tunes with your own player.

The visual design can make you feel like you’re having second thoughts about it. Wrapped around a classic window frame, you find a bunch of rather confusing buttons, with no tooltip brought up on mouseover, or any text tags whatsoever, and even the title bar is empty. You easily figure out, however, which starts and stop playback, and which is used to open a file.

Opening a song doesn’t work if you drop it over the window, so you need to use the built-in browse dialog. Supported formats only include WAV, MP3, and MIDI. You might want to pay attention to sound, because there’s not really any visual feedback, so you can’t really tell if the play function works, but it does.

Without a playlist manager, it means you need to take the time to load a new song when the current one ends, and this can easily get quite frustrating. Playback controls are only handled through the window, and the seemingly progress slider doesn’t have any effect.

To sum it up, Fastplayer leaves much to be desired overall, from the rough interface, to the poor set of playback features. Only one file can be processed at a time, with no support for playlists. There’s a long way ahead if it’s to ever make it among the decent programs of its kind.