14 DAY TRIAL // What could anybody write about a player so small and featureless, yet straightforward and dead-simple? I sit now in front of my desk looking at AudioPlayer and really don't know where to start from. I guess it has been rather developed for mobile hand-held devices than for PC-use: today's PCs have huge processing speeds, immense amounts of available memory and can handle applications thousands of times more complicate and demanding so I really can't see the exact point in designing such a software for other reasons than "because I can!"
I guess the developers of this tiny player have made it in one afternoon or so: no special design, no special functions, no sound enhancements, no anything, just a "frontend" for something that will play music. Curious yet? Let's advance....
The Looks
Again, as I said in other articles about similar softwares, "looks" means an exaggerating assertion: the AudioPlayer hasn't got any "looks" as it is a white window with grey borders and Windows-blue header. For those who haven't got the picture yet, the AudioPlayer's GUI is simply Windows-native with absolutely no different visual element! Stop thinking about skins: the only visual enhancement is that the user can change the background color so if you are ready to accept this as a visual enhancement...it's OK for me as well.
The AudioPlayer will look as good as your current Windows theme does because it simply takes the appearance of an usual Win screen: you run Win98 - AudioPlayer will look 98, you run a cool XP theme - there you go, you've got a slightly better looking software! But this is all...
AudioPlayer shows itself as a small window, with few menus in the upper part, 3 buttons (Play, Pause, Stop) a seekbar and a volume bar as well, with simple and uninteresting cursors. You'll eventually learn which menu you must access and what to push so you can see the playlist and even the lyrics, provided the audio you're listening to has such things embedded.
Overall the AudioPlayer looks silly as it brings absolutely nothing in what GUIs may be concerned. Nevertheless, should it work on hand-held devices, we might say it has a fair (and even decent) interface; and even so, I just know that most of those who normally own and use handhelds will simply not use AudioPlayer....
The Works
Even fewer words could really be said (or written) about AudioPlayer as what it does is so simple and so common! Maybe some years ago, such features might have been a recipe for success but nowadays, they are just minimal things one player must do in order to be worthy of bearing this name.
Shortly, I'll just tell you that AudioPlayer will handle audio in the MP3, WMA, MP2, WAV, ASF, MIDI, MOD and AU and will load playlists in formats like M3U, ASX, WAX and WPL adding that it has its own playlist format based on XML technology. In this matter, the AudioPlayer is pretty OK and should this OK have been extended to the rest, things could have been very attractive indeed!
There are some shortcuts to ease the control a bit but this does not make it a much better player; the volume shortcuts allow you to just play in full, half or no volume at all, therefore, are rather futile when need comes. The "Tools" are almost inexistent and the closest to real functionality is the "register playlist formats" which, obviously, will set the AudioPlayer as the default application for such playlists; others, like "use media keys" look more like they've been placed there just for the record.
Much to my surprise, the AudioPlayer supports multiple files drag and drop but the user can not append the newly dragged files to the existing list as they will simply replace the previous tracks and the playback of the added files will start instantaneously. Another thing I rejoiced seeing in AudioPlayer was the minimize to tray option which at least prevents you from seeing the boring interface while playing some audio...provided you are going to use this little program.
It does not sport any sort of EQ and this is rather bad because the sound seems to be not as good as in other EQ-less applications I have tested, but this might be just a personal illusion. AudioPlayer will display the name of the playing song as well as elapsed and total song time; too bad that instead of the much more useful artist name the GUI will tell you the local path of the file on your hard drive...
In the end, I'll say once more that AudioPlayer looks very much as having been produced just because its developers realized they could actually build it... I really can't see why would anyone want to run it on a contemporary PC....
The Good
Among the very few good things in this AudioPlayer's version, I could count in the minimize to tray feature and the drag and drop support.
The Bad
Too bad that the GUI is so inexpressive and demonstrates lack of interest... as well as the "featureless" feature...
The Truth
As an exercise to build up a player, AudioPlayer is to be hailed; as a serious programming endeavor it is to be laughed at. Sorry!
Some screenshots are available below:
