fmedia

fmedia provides an audio player, converter and recorder into a single package, having the extra advantage of requiring low system resources. Its footprint on the CPU and memory consumption is low, so as to allow continuous playback at all times.

While its interface might seem a bit rudimentary, the application does come with a few commands and features that make it worth a try. For instance, you can use it to create and manage several playlists at the same time, opening each one in a separate tab. On the downside, although playlists can be saved, it is impossible to rename the tabs, so as to know what each playlist contains.

fmedia ensures compatibility with some of the most popular formats, including MP3, OGG, OPUS, MP4, M4A, MKV, AVI, WAV, FLAC, and more. The player can open URLs. Playlists can contain any number of music files and, for each of them, fmedia displays the artist name, the title, the duration, the album, the location, and other metadata.

Aside from music playback, fmedia also allows for audio recording and conversion. The first function enables you to record audio and save it as a FLAC file, with a few predefined settings, such as the sample rate, the format, the audio channel to use, the gain level, and the codec to use. To change these parameters, you must use the console app.

It is also possible to convert sections of audio files with fmedia. You get to see the default values of parameters such as the input interval, the bitrate, the output quality, the compression rate, the gain level, the channels to use, the sample rate, and so on. Unfortunately, you cannot modify these settings in the GUI, but only pass the desired values as parameters when using the console version.

fmedia can decode various audio formats and comes with simple playback control and support for multiple playlists. Aside from the reduced resource usage, these are its utmost features. On the other hand, some functions (e.g., opening a folder, changing conversion and recording parameters from the GUI) did not work during our tests. Needless to say, there is work to be done to enhance the application and turn it into a real competitor to other similar tools