Phinix

There’s quite the variety of audio players over the web so you can use to listen to your favorite tracks offline, manage playlists, and more. It’s all a matter of choice, and Phinix is one of them. With an intuitive design and set of controls, possibility to create playlists, it’s sure to stay on your PC for more than a song.

One of its main advantages is the lack of a setup process, giving you the possibility to carry it around on a thumb drive to listen to your favorite tracks on other computers as well. Registry entries are not modified in the process, so you don’t have to worry about affecting the target PC’s stability.

All features are wrapped around an intuitive, simple interface, and can also hide to the tray area when not directly used. The first launch brings up the configuration panel. Here you can specify a song directory to target it and all its subfolders, whether to show tray notifications for playback status, and song info, as well as the method of handling album art which can mean reading from source directories, or attempting to grab online.

The set of controls makes it easy to play/pause, stop, and navigate through playlist elements. You can skip through content with the help of a progress slider, while volume is adjusted from a different one. Album art is also shown if available, but there’s no song info other than artist, and title, such as playback time, or genre.

Playlist file support handles M3U items, which are saved in the application’s source directory. Either through drag and drop, or simply filling one with items from the explorer tab, a playlist is easily created with a custom name tag.

Bottom line is that Phinix doesn’t come with a wide variety of features to overwhelm you, focusing on simple, direct playback. Loading files is easily done by selecting a source folder, while playlists are created for more comfort. With songs playing, it can quietly sit in the tray area, and even notify you of playback status, and song info.