CosmoCD

Can anyone at least estimate the number of CD-player softwares? I guess not, I am thinking to ask my co-workers but I just know they are going to have such a laugh...at me! So I'll just keep on thinking how should I begin a review for a software which is...I really don't know how it is.

I was looking for some really cute software (audio) CD players; simple and with nice, warm and functional GUIs. And instead I stepped on the CosmoCD and I can't really say that I am glad I did so. When people usually get to download a free player, or even buy a specialized one, it is very likely to assume that the software either has a very lovely interface or brings something new in what CD players are concerned or is a tool which can manage more tasks at once - an integrated multi-player.

There are softwares which are not offered for money and, when it comes to these, one can really expect lacks and slight imperfections, even insufficient interest paid to their development sometimes. Well, it looks like CosmoCD is one of these programs.

The Looks. The Works. My Woe.

One thing is sure: CosmoCD is one easy-to-use program. Its GUI consists of a fixed-size window displaying commands and additional data, "cosmo"-painted (a very dark blue background with small star-like dots) and large, easy to read text.

The problem is that the whole interface looks like it has been created by a child in his early design-attempts: the playback-control buttons look absolutely horrid, despite their large size and standard marking, the developer decided to write text on them and has done this in an extremely crappy way. Besides the fact that they look as if they had been drawn in MS Paint, the letters have different sizes and are uneven, strongly creating the impression of mockery.

And if this does not seem enough, CosmoCD is skinnable and you can easily download some skins from the producer's website, though I don't quite recommend you to do so. The default skin may be rather bad, but please believe me: the rest are even worse!

After I inserted a CD and had the freedb properly set up, I queried it, and I also noticed that overall, the text displayed in the CosmoCD's GUI looks really scrambled and lacks even the basic impression of order.

The Preferences window has an even more terrible aspect, as it has a different size and the code written for CosmoCD can't work properly with the background image and tiles it in the most annoying ways. I smiled once more as I noticed the "make CosmoCD the default CD player" option; there should have been a "just kidding" mark, and things could have been pretty OK, but there is not... The other options include the skin directory and the system tray icon which despite the fact that it's a good option, it looks awful as well.

As for the workings of CosmoCD, things are a bit weird too. The process priority is almost zero as when I wasn't playing the CD in my drive, CosmoCD was able to interrogate both it and freedb. As I was playing the CD in Winamp, it could not do this anymore; which sucks! A good thing is that both elapsed time and the total time of a track are displayed on separate screens.

One thing which was also bad: you can't fast forward nor rewind while playing a track; as a matter of fact you can't do this anyway! CosmoCD does not work with hotkeys or shortcuts, so you either start a CD and let it play until the end (or as long as you like) or you just have to wait on CosmoCD as it does not have repeat or shuffle functions. As a final word, if you haven't noticed by now, CosmoCD will play only audio CDs; no point in trying to make it play something else...

The Good

This is a difficult one! The only good thing I saw in CosmoCD was that it can go to the system tray and it displays the elapsed and total track time.

The Bad

I can't and I won't enumerate here what looked and felt bad to me.

The Truth

If CosmoCD is a joke, it's pretty OK; the same applies whether it has been made by a child. And I will stop here, but not before giving you a warning not to load the Colin skin as it will hurt your eyes ?badly :)

So help me God, below are the screenshots: