akPlayer

Having to listen to your favorite songs offline requires a media player which can read the source formats. There is an abundance of different encodings which generate various audio formats. As such, akPlayer comes with a comfortable set of features to help you play a large variety of both audio and video files.

As far as the visual design is concerned, the application stores its set of features in a minimalistic window frame, using classic elements. Even so, playback controls are quite intuitive, and even inexperienced individuals quickly get the hang of things. The application resides in the tray area when not used, while hotkey support makes control even more comfortable.

The application is mostly based on a playlist mode, in the sense that you are more or less forced to create a playlist with at least one file. Support of formats is decent, with the possibility to load some of the most common audio and video file types for playback. These can be placed all together in the same playlist.

Playback starts as soon as you’re done creating the playlist. On the downside, the file list is shown as a drop-down menu, rather than a classic list for a better view. What’s more, playlist file support only includes the PLT format, which isn’t really a common format.

You can access the options menu to define some general behavior options. These include a repeat interval, which can be set to infinite, going hand-in-hand with the shuffle option, hotkey support, whether or not to enable tray minimization, as well as to enable video preview of files, in case you simply want to listen to the audio track.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that akPlayer might not come with an advanced set of features, or a spectacular design to make it stand out from the crowd. However, it does include fully functional options of creating a mixed playlist of both video and audio files, saving it, and playing it with attributes like repeat and shuffle.