14 DAY TRIAL // It's the last article for the day and I was looking for something special. When I first saw 1by1 with so many downloads and having such a high ranking despite it's size I thought there is something wrong. I downloaded and installed it; then I ran the program and initially burst into laughs.
Well, I'm sorry! There's nothing hilarious about this really amazing piece of code. I discovered an absolutely beautiful player loaded with lots of features despite its ridiculous 100 KB size. Even though I expected a crappy window in which you drag a song and play it, I was almost shocked to discover a very complete and intelligent player.
As I kept on wondering and begun to explore its options, I realized that 1by1 is not a joke-software at all, but rather a pretty well-balanced mixture between features, small size, ease-of-use and...surprise.
The Looks & The Works
I'd say about 1by1 that it has a very interesting GUI: a combination between a minimalist style, an almost Spartan and a soft'n'stylish warmth you only meet in designer-skins. Well, 1by1 has no skins and no option related to the way it looks. Nevertheless it still looks pretty. Small (maybe a bit too small) transport control buttons on top of an Explorer-like window.
Indeed, the 1by1 looks a lot like Windows Explorer with a baby-blue background. You can easily toggle the tree-view as well as the playlist view by means of mouse clicks or shortcuts. And if I reached this chapter...the 1by1 is a shortcut-lover's heaven. I haven't had the time to test and explore them all, but I guess I won't be very wrong to say that 95% of 1by1's commands and features are shortcut-controllable. Just awesome!
I already began understanding why people love 1by1. The overall design is so simple, so familiar. No strange signs or twisted-looking buttons, only calm colors and native Windows elements...they all leave the impression that you already know the software even if it's the first time you see it.
You can set 1by1 to search for music in your drives or directly load entire directories using drag and drop. The playlist shows info on the size of the songs loaded, extension, last date they were modified and even the local path. As you expect sorting on all these issues is also supported.
1by1 can be minimized to tray! I confess I never expected such a feature from such a small and seemingly "unimportant" program, but there it was! And it was "not all at all": the 1by1 also has an option for showing big title view, you can set it always on top, and you can set it so it shows elapsed time or a combination between total and remaining time in the titlebar, along with the artist and song info. Sounds already much interesting, doesn't it?
Getting used to the surprises I went on and checked the general settings more accurately. Again one thing I didn't expect and that no one had told me before: an entire section dedicated to audio enhancement, with intelligent controls and presets, featuring a VU with pre- and post- signal, amping, stereo separation, thresholds and all sorts of limitations so your sound won't go astray; on the contrary to sound good. Should I also mention the 3-band EQ?
When I said 1by1 was intelligent, I was speaking about the Gapless Output-mode programming. You can get a continuous playback without need for plugings: 1by1 can use its own buffering systems and mix everything right. Or you can prepare plugins, of course. I must add that 1by1even has a compact mode for those who don't use the minimize-to-tray feature. The progress bar and the volume slide bar are unfortunately the only not-so-good things in the 1by1 player. They are rather hard to spot in the full-mode; during the compact view mode, they occupy sufficient space of the whole area, so you can't miss them; otherwise they retract to an upper-left section of the main window.
As a final consideration, in my opinion they should have been drawn at least in more contrasting nuances, if not in a bit more striking colors. But this little mishap is sweetened a bit again by the easy shortcut operation for both bars.
When you use the 1by1 player in the windowed-mode - be that mode the full or normal one - and have set up the feature that shows time and artist info in the titlebar, the same thing appears on its tab in the Windows taskbar. If you run this program in the minimized-to-tray mode and you want to see the artist name and the song title all you have to do is hover your mouse on the tray icon and this info appears exactly as Winamp shows it in similar situations.
Another nice feature related to the 1by1's Windows Explorer appearance is that when you toggle the tree view on and select a folder, the player automatically tells you the number of tracks and their total size.
The Good
I don't know? I liked everything. It is a totally free mp3 player, incredibly small in size and at the same time almost burdened with either handy or very useful features - some of which are not to be found in more "pretentious" players.
Most important pros I noticed: -EQ and amping -tray minimizing -shortcuts for almost everything (you just need to learn them)
The Bad
The only thing I have to add at this chapter is not at all bad, but rather one thing that I (and I guess there are a lot of people like me) would love to see: support for wave and CDA files.
The Truth
The best completely non-commercial mp3 player I have seen so far. A perfect tool for those who like the minimalist players and the freedom they provide. A final word? I love it!
Here you can see some screenshots of 1by1 working.
