Festival

Having a reliable music player at the ready is always a good thing. Perhaps the built-in one that comes with Windows isn’t up to your standards, likewise for any streaming platform’s. Maybe you’re an offline-only music listener with a more particular taste — there should be plenty of tools to choose from still.

Festival is a music player with a decidedly minimalist approach. Designed to offer users an experience where experiencing your favorite music without any inconveniences is the primary objective, the player is customizable, easy to manipulate, and low on resource consumption.

If you don’t get along with the player’s interface, then you’re in for an experience more frustrating than it should be. This one takes a simple approach, where navigating from one song to the next is done with just a few clicks and without delay at all.

You can view any added albums, artists, and songs by going to their respective sections. Viewing the queue is also possible, and if you’re one to create playlists, it’s good to know that you can make and manage as many as you like here. I especially liked that you can add songs to a playlist by using the CTRL+LMB hotkey on the respective tracks.

By default, the tool will scan your profile’s Music folder for any tunes. If you don’t store your library in there, it’s best to head into the Settings menu to add more directories.

There are more than a few customization options, which you can find under Settings. These involve changing the order your library entries are displayed, how album art sizes are shown, and also how the window title should look when you’re playing something.

Interestingly enough, being able to modify the search function’s behavior is something you can configure. The program can return results based on different similarity configurations: you may opt to have the top 25 similar results shown, or only those with at least a 70% match. It’s good that they also added being able to view all the results, sorted from most to least similar.

Festival is a music player that I found very intriguing. The program gives you numerous options to customize your experience, and navigating through it is as simple as it should be.