14 DAY TRIAL // Seems like even the small and supposedly easy and inexpensive software music players are changing these days: from their basic condition, by adding some new and more or less useful features, up goes the price! I may be wrong to say this about the 4D AudioPlayer SGLX, but at least to me and my team mates it really looked like this. Programs with far more functionality and options sell for almost half the price the producers of the 4D AudioPlayer SGLX are asking; but since price is rather a lesser concern for me now, let's advance to the proper story...
While other softwares claim to be true multimedia centers or "all-in-one"-type, the 4D AudioPlayer SGLX states that its mission is to make your audio sound better than most other audio you have ever played; the flagship-feature is declared to be the StereoBase Enhancer, but we'll just see to it...
The Looks. The Works. Why that price?
4D AudioPlayer SGLX is a one-window software, having all fields welded together in a rather small design. The Info pane - which displays the artist and song title - is very well organized and really looks pretty: LED-type text and VU-meters from green to yellow and red, elapsed time (unfortunately, no total or remaining time), bitrate and frequency, as well as stereo mode and type of file are neatly displayed, practically giving you all the data you might need.
The bad thing is that the seek bar is hardly visible and even harder to operate: I spotted it by chance, as I would have never thought a seek bar could look like that. Next is the spectrum-view pane which has sweeping cursor, running left to right and leaving behind it the traces of the visual data; clicking the mouse in the spectrum analyzer field quickly displays info regarding the frequency you are pointing to, but does not give level readings, so it is only half functional.
The following pane is dedicated to a massive 20-band EQ, with preamp level and good info content as it shows the frequency-range for each slider and the level in dBs as well, so you get a better and more technical picture on the settings of the EQ, setting which - by the way - you can also save/load as you like.
The next area has been reserved for the transport control buttons, playlist admin, menu and volume, together with the slide bar at the bottom of the window which regulates the mix for the StereoBase Enhancer. The playlist is rather weird to set up, as when you press the "123" button, a new window pops out and it is only there that you can browse for locations on your PC containing music, then select them and customly add them to a playlist you can save. The same goes for deleting files from the playlist as the playlist is the only "interface" you can use to play audio in the 4D AudioPlayer SGLX: no drag and drop, not even for a single file!
It is also in this area where you can control the reverberation quickly available at a press of a button. This reverb/echo can be set up using the Setup menu in the Reverb special menu; lots of parameters can be tweaked, as if this were a DX plugin and not something to be used with usual daily playback IF SOMEHOW NEEDED... Nevertheless, you have already prepared a large number of presets, so if you - by any chance - want to play with echoes while listening to your favorite audio, I guess you are quite welcome.
The last feature is the StereoBase Enhancer, an element controllable by means of a large slide bar. I haven't really seen the point in it, as long as you have good-quality audio playing on, but - who knows - for lousy speakers or headphones, this could be the only thing that makes music sound close to OK.
Finally, the Preferences menu is rather poor, allowing you only to make file associations for the total of 5 file formats the 4D AudioPlayer SGLX can handle ( WAV, MP3, ATX, M3U and CDA) and to tweak the buffer-size (from 4KB for 0,02 seconds up to 800KB for 4,64 seconds) or set the audio device to be used.
After having spent 2 hours observing and playing the 4D AudioPlayer SGLX, I can't really see why such a big price for a rather common and not-at-all-special music playback software, with no minimize feature, no visible playlist and also lacking most of the commonly-met characteristics for such programs.
The Good
I'd rather say the best thing about the 4D AudioPlayer SGLX is the 20-band EQ, even though it was not centered, the 0 dB point being about one third lower than the upper limit of the screen.
The Bad
I find 4D AudioPlayer SGLX unjustifiably expensive, while not offering a "breakthrough" or exquisite feature and this should be bad enough :) No quickly-accessible playlist and an engine which can't read further ID3 data can't possibly be sold for this money.
The Truth
I did not find the 4D AudioPlayer SGLX that amazing as I was first told; all I found was a fairly good software which needs a lot of improvement to deserve the $28 it sells for.
Check out the screenshots and see for yourselves:
