Portable Kantaris

Probably the first thing you do when arriving home is turning on the computer and play a song to relax, in case you haven’t been already listening to some music on your way home. In case you decide to play your favorite multimedia offline, you need applications like Portable Kantaris.

The first advantage is that the application can easily be carried around on a USB Flash drive along with songs and videos because there’s no need to install it. This ensures that your computer stays clean since registries are not modified, while the resources needed to run are of no concern.

All features are cleverly organized in a neat interface fitted with clean visuals, buttons, panels, and other elements. Several window size states can be triggered, either to send it to the taskbar, maximize the window, run in full screen, or manually adjust it by dragging borders.

There are four areas of interest found in individual tabs. As such, the playback tab takes care of local files and anything that’s playing, last.fm radio goes online to fetch songs of interest, movie trailers tease you with upcoming blockbusters, while the video library is empty by default so you need to populate it with video folders.

As far as file support is concerned, the application does a pretty good job at handling ASF, AVI, DIVX, FLV, GXF, M2V, MP4, MKV, MOV, MPEG, AAC, FLAC, MKA, MOD, MP3, OGG, WMA, and more, with additional support for CD/DVDs, as well as online radio through a link you provide.

What’s more, you can easily add files of all kind by popping out the playlist editor and simply dragging them over the main window or using the built-in browse dialogs. It’s possible to load existing playlists or save your own under the M3U format. For more diversity, you can shuffle or randomize the playlist, and also choose to repeat tracks.

Playback is neat, with several visualizations presets for music and good online video quality. Playback controls are intuitive, and if you pay a visit to the settings menu, you can set custom hotkeys for a much more comfortable experience.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Portable Kantaris is a fully-featured multimedia player that you should consider trying out if you’re looking for something new. The set of features is sure to meet even sophisticated demands, with neat file support, clever playlist editor, configurable hotkeys and more.