Power Hour

Power Hour is a lightweight Windows application whose purpose is to help your play you audio files.

Since this is a portable program, it is important to mention that it doesn’t leave any traces in the Windows Registry.

You can copy it on any USB flash drive or other devices, and take it with you whenever you need to play audio files on the fly, without having to go through installation steps.

The user interface looks quite plain and reveals information about each audio track (only file location).

There’s support only for some master controls designed to help you play, pause, or stop the current audio selection, go to the previous or next song, and delete files from the list. The built-in buttons for mastering the audio playback are not very attractive.

Power Hour gives you the possibility to change the background image and adjust the text in terms of font, color, and size. During our testing we have noticed that Power Hour carries out a task quickly and provides good audio quality. It leaves a minimal footprint on system resources, so the overall performance of the computer is not affected.

The lack of configurable settings makes it an ideal tool for rookies who don’t want to spend a lot of time tweaking the playing parameters. On the downside, it would have been useful to see support for volume adjustment options, equalizer, and plugins, just to name a few suggestions. You cannot repeat the current audio selection, play songs in a random order, create and save playlists, and seek for a position in the audio streams

To sum it up, Power Hour proves to be a basic audio player that comes bundled with limited features. It needs several improvements in the GUI area to make the process more pleasant and intuitive, and advanced features for enhancing its overall functionality.