Jalal

In case your Internet connection isn’t quite capable of clearly streaming audio for you to enjoy all of your favorite songs, a dedicated application needs to be used for offline playback. Some managed to make a name for themselves over the years, while others barely got noticed. For instance, Jalal is a slim audio player you can use on the go.

Portability comes as a major advantage, letting you place the application along with several songs on a thumb drive to always have what to listen to, and a tool for playback. Runtime doesn’t put a strain on the target computer, and registry entries remain intact during this whole time.

As far as the visual design is concerned, the overall arrangement is rather poor, even though buttons and functions are intuitive. Leaving aesthetics aside, you can start to load audio files which can be under formats like MP3, WAV, WMA, and MIDI. You can drop them over the playlist, or use the browse dialog for individual selection or the content of an entire folder at once.

There’s a built-in option to remember loaded songs on the next session. You can also save the playlist or load an existing one, but the type of file needs to be JLT, with no support for popular ones like M3U or PLS. During playback, the application can be minimized to the taskbar. However, it still needs to be brought up to handle playback controls, because hotkeys are only local.

Playback controls consist of common play, pause, and stop buttons. Volume is adjusted through a dedicated slider, while a different one lets you skip through content, operation which can also be done through fast forward or rewind buttons. You can set the computer to automatically power off after a specific amount of time.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that Jalal is a straightforward audio player which mostly comes in handy to help you fall asleep while listening to a song or two, thanks to the built-in shutdown scheduler. File support is decent, and so are playback controls, and it might just come in handy if you get past the rough design.