WaveBrowser

Audio files don’t necessarily have to mean a song, since they’re important resources used even as effects. Multiple formats are available, each preserving quality with different encoders. One of the basic formats is WAV, and WaveBrowser wants to make it easy to identify them, initiate preview, and perform simple management operations.

The application comes in a lightweight package, which doesn’t even require installation for it to work. This enables you to carry it around on a thumb drive, and use on other computers besides your own. What’s more, no changes are made to registry entries, without the need to worry about the health status of the target PC.

Once up, the main window shows a tree list of all folders on your computer, and any external storage devices, if connected. The other half of the window represents the file browser. It is tweaked to only show WAV files inside a selected folder, but it doesn’t count subdirectories.

Playback is initiated by simply clicking a file in the browsed, while right-clicking stops. However, it might not perfectly generate the preview, as it stopped receiving updates for quite some time, and it can show signs of compatibility issues on modern Windows iterations.

The file browser can be set to show large or small icons, a list of items, or details table which includes filename, format, length, size, as well as type. You can enable loop playback is length is short.

In terms of management options, there aren’t many options to work with. A new folder can be created, but careful when doing so, because the selected folder gets expanded, which might result in a crash if done on the system drive. Drag and drop allows you to move files around, with additional options to rename, and delete.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that WaveBrowser comes in handy for easily checking whether folders contain WAV files, and instantly generate a preview. However, there’s a high chance audio preview is not properly triggered on new Windows iterations, while the lack of a search function makes navigation, and identification rather difficult.