phiola

A good, compact audio player that plays most formats is always appreciated. Make it portable, so that you can take it on a USB stick with you and launch it whenever you need, and you’ve got an intriguing offer already.

That is the scope behind phiola. It’s an audio that focuses on being lightweight and compact, but not to the detriment of functionality. Besides featuring support for a wide range of formats, it additionally offers the user audio conversion and recording capabilities, all while remaining portable.

The program gets straight to the point as far as UI design is concerned. It’s a practical solution through and through, which the design reveals from the jump. Even if you’re unfamiliar, operating the software is fairly accessible, as the functions and their prerogatives are all clearly presented.

You can start by dropping your tunes in, or specifying their file path. It is thus possible to import your whole music library like so if you desire: after adding everything, I’d recommend using the CTRL+S hotkey to save your playlist details, just so you can have them at the ready if you decide to make the most of the app’s portable capacity.

The software is quite generous with its audio format support, and to further that, you also get access to a converter tool. It lets you choose between .m4a, .ogg, .opus, .flac, .wav, and .mp3 for output, as well as tune the fidelity of the audio.

A recorder is also bundled in, but I found it to be largely unreliable. Starting a recording would immediately stop it, making it impossible to use this functionality.

Though only in beta, phiola is a promising music player that manages to be compact, easy to use, while also bundling in some useful nice-to-haves, such as the audio converter it comes with.