Rise Media Player

A media player that plays both music and videos can be quite helpful in a number of situations, and the idea of being able to do both things within the same interface indeed sounds very convenient. It can be a bit difficult to strike a balance between delivering a good music listening and clip watching experience, however.

Rise Media Player is quite ambitious in that sense, as it seeks to offer users the capability to manage their music library, while also affording them the ability to play their favorite clips, all under the same interface.

The efforts to make this solution match with Windows 11's design language are quite evident, and what the end user gains from this is an interface that is easy to navigate through, while also remaining relatively lightweight. The initial setup is useful in getting everything up and running: add the folders where you store your songs and videos, and you're set.

You'll be able to listen to your local tunes just as you would on any music player. In that sense, it can be argued that the player is faintly reminiscent of Apple Music's, but that's just an initial impression. Listen to your songs, go through your artists and their albums, and even create playlists of your favorite tunes.

The tool recognized our audio files without a problem, and being able to play music via URL is also nice, though it's worth mentioning that you'll require a direct link to the song — so a YouTube URL won't work.

The video player is nothing to write home about. It's there and should play your footage without much fuss, but with this only being an Alpha version of the program, there are some caveats. Many functions are locked as they haven't yet been fully developed, but it's nevertheless a functional solution.

It's also worth pointing out that we experienced some unstable behavior from the program. It's to be expected, after all, but the app doesn't seem to handle larger media libraries all that well. Increasing the number of media folders would cause the program to crash quite frequently, irrespective of whether it was looking to update our library.

Overall, Rise Media Player is a promising solution, but the general instability can render this a little more than frustrating to deal with at times. The potential is certainly there, however.