14 DAY TRIAL // I really don't know what has gotten into me and made me download this software. Curiosity, some sort of fate? I don't know and I don't care. I'm just looking at this piece of code on my desktop and trying to gather some ideas to be put down ?on paper?.
This mp3 player is so simple I don't know where to start. Basically it plays mp3files or mp3 directories. You can add files to a playlist and play them. And that's all. It's free and this is nice, it runs on almost any resources, which is also good.
The Looks
The Cool Mp3 Player looks a little bit old. Old, I mean retro like Spectrum, Amiga, C64 or Hercules-graphics times. Maybe not that old, but somewhere around those above mentioned. It looks more like it has had its GUI drawn in a big hurry since it severely lacks any finishing touch. The rounded corners have ?broken? shapes, and some color-areas are not well-enough placed, leaving the background color visible in some spots.
Not much attention has the developer paid to coloring the interface considering some really dull grey nouances which do not go that well with the intense green of other elements. The Cool Mp3 Player states the presence of skins: a bit exaggerated! Rather than skins we'd speak about some other color schemes. From the total of 6 such schemes, I?ve personally liked only 2 which unfortunately DO NOT MATCH with the unchanging deep-green arrows! Might this be a flaw or did the developer simply forget to re-color these arrows?
One nice thing in the Cool Mp3 Player's looks is the fact that all its windows are retractable and remain grouped whatsoever. The green arrows toggle on and off these 3 windows: the EQ, the Playlist and the About. It?s too bad that the text in Cool Mp3 Player's GUI looks like it has been randomized. Fonts vary in size and in some certain points text can't even be read, you'll rather presume what's there by looking to its surroundings.
Space is not administered in the most efficient way: in the top region of the master window, there is a lot of room completely unused while in the opposite side the playback controls are small and crowded. All three bars (progress bar, volume and balance) are thin and their cursors are barely visible.
The EQ is also crowded, way too crowded for at least a decent operation. Should anyone try and use its faders frequently I guess he/she would soon curse and give up. The same space problem: the EQ's faders are extremely short while at both ends there is still plenty of room; combining upper- and lower-part free space, I guess we get the faders' entire length as it is now. Weird...
Finally, the playlist is small, having the same proportions as the rest of the software. Too bad you can't make it wider and really see the whole title of some tracks. The counter in the main window shows the elapsed time while addition info refers to bit rate, sample rate and encoder used. Occasionally, artist and song info scrolls by. Ah, and you can't minimize the window!
The Works
Cool Mp3 Player is only an mp3 player so there?s no use in trying to play wave files or other things like that. To my great surprise the EQ is DEAD! Not only the faders' movement produces no audio result but also the Auto and Presets buttons do nothing. So much for the EQ... The drag and drop is not supported for the playlist and neither is the removal of files by merely pressing the Del key on your keyboard.
I tried to save a playlist; so I pushed the Save button in the List menu. It pushed. And that was all. No output path selection, no filename required. Same ?push and stop? thing happens when trying to load a playlist. No ID2/ID3 editing available but at least about that, the developer kind of warned when saying it was an extremely simple player.
The playback has 2 modes, the single-pass mode and the repeat all mode which work OK, as well as the Shuffle option. One thing I have met only in Cool Mp3 Player: when you start the program the volume is automatically set to zero; so if sometime you start it, load your fav music, push Play and nothing is heard don't panic: check the volume. The last things that I will add for the works of Cool Mp3 Player are the total absence of shortcuts, the fact that the Windows Alt+F4 command can't shut down the application and also repeated clicking on the tab in the taskbar won't switch tasks as one might expect.
The Good
Thanks God this one is free. I feared someone could charge for its use. The good things are rather few and the most noticeable are the grouping of all panes, the very low resources-consumption and the small size.
The Bad
Needless to say, I won't enumerate anything else but the facts that intrigue me the most as: the non-functional EQ, the disorderedly-displayed text all over the interface, the no-drag'n'drop and the fact that Del doesn't work in the playlist. The rest is up to you?
The Truth
It is a software which has some potential, too bad the developer seemed extremely hurried and left so many things astray. Hopefully the next version will bring better things.
Check out some screenshots of Cool Mp3 Player:
