Media Player

Windows comes packed with a great variety of features to help perform a little bit of every kind of task, including simple playback of audio files. Needless to say that the Internet is the place to find all sorts of alternatives, just in case you’re not quite fond of default tools. As such, Media player comes as a straightforward audio player.

A good thing about it is that you don’t have to go through a setup process to make it work, so it’s easy to have it stored on a thumb drive to serve as a personal audio player. The health status of the target PC doesn’t get affected because registry entries remain intact, but you do need to make sure that it’s fitted with .NET Framework.

On the visual side, the application keeps things simple, with a comfortable set of controls to help you play, pause, stop, and navigate through songs, skip through content via a dedicated slider, and adjust volume. It comes with a playlist editor, but you need to access it from the view menu, and it’s pretty large to always keep in plain sight.

As far as file support is concerned, the application can only be used to play MP3 files, which is rather disappointing. You can have multiple files saved inside a playlist, which can be set to update according to playback rate. Sadly, the list isn’t fitted with a shuffle function, but you can apply filters to the list according to media tags.

Additional controls are found in the main window to repeat items, and adjust playback speed. Sadly, there’s no hotkey support for easier manipulation of playback, and a multimedia keyboard doesn’t really help either.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that Media player is not really the alternative you’re looking for, at least not if your audio collection contains files under more formats than just MP3. A straightforward set of features is delivered, while playback management can become a little frustrating.