RokQ

There's no such party without at least a few songs to play and keep on a good audio vibe. This can easily be done even with the tools Windows comes equipped with, but there are even more, dedicated to ensuring that everyone is having a good time. One such alternative to conventional players is RokQ, simplifying the whole experience, with a little surprise involved if you have a webcam.

Before rushing to take the application for a spin, make sure you enable administrator privileges if you plan on using a webcam, so that the application can properly take over without any conflicts. The main window is pretty compact and based on color differentiation for its features, playing songs, filters and more.

As the interface suggests, loading files to the playlist is easily done by dragging the target folder over the main window, but only MP3 files work. One or more can be added, with songs being displayed in a list and a few filters are made available so you can pick songs by genres. It's enough to double click any song to make it play.

However, the whole experience is a little odd and difficult to get acquainted with. There aren't any playback controls other than a barely visible “pause” button that toggles palyback state. The upper toolbar is fitted with a few slots that represent the queue, but once items are added you need to wait for them to play through, because there's no implemented function to skip or select another song, which has a big impact on practicality.

Right before the main window pops up, a prompt asks whether or not you want to use a connected webcam. If so, the second a song starts playing a picture is taken via the webcam, with a screen brought up so you can add comments, which are then embedded in the EXIF data, and automatically saved in your default picture folder.

There aren't any editing options when it comes to images, nor for the playlist itself. If the upper queue is full, you need to sit through or start the application again to reset every song and start over. Only when the items in queue are done playing does the application pick other, random songs from the playlist, given they haven't already played, so you need to make sure there are enough songs for the whole party.

Bottom line is that RokQ is not exactly the item you want to bring to the party. It's packed with good intentions, trying to minimize the effort needed for songs to play, with the neat webcam feature capturing sudden moments at parties. However, overall implementation of features and lack of at least basic navigation and playback controls make practicality highly questionable.