14 DAY TRIAL // ?Simply AMAZING and sounding AWESOME!? This is what I can tell you now, after almost three hours of constant hearing and tweaking, exploration and experiments with the DeliPlayer! Yes, it's a free player which really kicks a**: looking great, hyper-functional and with literally hundred if not even thousands of tweaking-possibilities! Even if I am not able to review three softwares today as I promised, this is a small and unimportant loss, since I have found such a great program to write about.
I even showed it to my tech/video fellows at SoftPedia.com and they couldn't believe such a nice program is offered for free while delivering such high listening-quality, such a versatile behavior, support for some hundreds of file-formats, hi-tech visualization modes and almost perfect operation. If we were to compare between some leading music players, I guess the only one which could withstand the immense amount of features and capabilities would be Foobar while programs such as Winamp, WMP or whatever other programs you could think of would just lower their eyes and depart from such confrontation in shame.
The Looks
I still can't exactly tell what has struck me most: the way DeliPlayer looked or what I soon discovered it was capable of. The greatest thing is that DeliPlayer can look the way you want or decide it should look: you can make it look rather like a toolbar or (really) fill a hi-res monitor screen with all the contained modules, visuals and rest of the gadgets.
And what's even better is that in-between these two extreme modes you have total freedom to choose whether and what it should be displayed. From TWO playlitst and up to the 5 simultaneously-displayable visualizations, ID3 editor, detailed track info, timed generic behavior and even a recorder-pane, you have almost everything playback-related thing imaginable.
Three general GUI-themes are available, for the totally inexperienced users up to the experts of sound (or those who can read and use info provided by the player) and each theme can be endlessly visually configured. FFT analyzers, level meters, waveforms or spectral views can be displayed in a wide array of preset colors and color-combinations so every user can be happy with the way his/her DeliPlayer looks like. The default skin is rather too darkened, but still it looks absolutely great; nevertheless, you can even switch to an OS native-inspired theme which (obviously) will make DeliPlayer look like a (in my case) native XP player. Not that great, but who can tell about each person's preferences.
Another simply beautiful thing is that each of the small windows can be resized no matter how large or small and can also be arranged in any configuration imaginable, so it's just up to you whether you get a total mess on your desktop or an exquisite and very pro-looking media player. Even with all components set to ?display? and thus having the entire desktop covered in DeliPlayer's modules, you can easily minimize it to the system tray and thus free up a lot of space in your work area.
Still, this beta version can be further improved such as not to add by default taskbar items for most of the modules one could at a give time decide to have DeliPlayer display: you can change this setting but it's very annoying to do so for all windows ? besides, I was just lucky to discover this possibility, otherwise I would have written untrue things about this; yet, this is too much of a little thing as to cast a shadow on how good DeliPlayer in fact looks like. Small, yet extremely handy features add more and more to the general mark for quality the DeliPlayer will get from me: in front of each file, the program will display a small, yet very readable and intuitive icon, so you need just a quick look and receive info on what's in the playlist; then, as you add files to the playlist it will automatically display them as a tree view making things even easier to manage even from the visual stage.
Even if it may seem that the ID3 and the Detailed Information data-flow is rather huge, you'll soon notice that it is so well visually-organized that it really helps you ?know what's to know? in just instants. DeliPlayer can easily display playlists-in-playlists in the dedicated screen, being a much simpler to use audio library than usually it usually occurs in major similar applications.
And if all these above were not enough to convince you about the high quality of the DeliPlayer, right before I start writing about the works I'll add that EACH single small window/module present in the DeliPlayer is customizable even for features like Snap to others, Hide taskbar item, Always on top and the rest of things you simply never get to at least see about in other programs.
The Works
One thing I'll boldly say from the very beginning: DeliPlayer by itself (meaning no enhancement-plugins) sounds FAR better than anything I have played music in and I can assure you that in the evening I'll test the sound quality on my semi-pro gear at home and should the tests turn out at least as good as what I have seen so far here, then the DeliPlayer will officially become my new player.
4 hours have passed since I started working with DeliPlayer to see what's going on and discover the immense number of options and settings it runs on: no errors, except for those caused directly by me and some knowledge lacks in the DeliPlayer's working. I hope it's obvious that I will not describe each module (but briefly), since otherwise this review would instantly become a huge one.
DeliPlayer proudly presents you a new and very functional type of playlist, supporting playlists-in-playlists, some 230 file-types and virtually unlimited search ways. And if I arrived to the search engine, here's a really interesting one: you first enter a search string and then select the fields, which the search should be restricted to, in order to save time and energy: from artist and song name to almost surreal things such as release date, format, frequency, times played and so on, for a total of more than 30 items. Quite handy and precise workmanship, I must admit!
ID3 information is directly and most easily editable when you have the corresponding window displayed on your desktop: just click and edit the data, hit Return and all is OK. You don't need to keep the detailed information window on top of your screen if you don't really need it, but as the info it contains instantly changes as soon as a new song is being played, it becomes rather a very useful thing.
The ?timed behavior? I have been telling you about lets you preset the number of tracks, minutes or playlists the DeliPlayer will run through before performing one of the following actions: quit (exit Deli), LogOff, ShutDown, PowerOff. DeliPlayer goes deep down in Windows because you can even force shutdown! As well, you can set the number of seconds between the action-warning and the proper course of the specified action, should you change your mind.
The Recorder inside DeliPlayer will allow you to record in mono mode everything going on in there. The stereo mode is available in the Pro version of the DeliPlayer and allows you to work and save in any format understood by the DeliPlayer. The EQ works pretty well and has a feature I have never met in any other equalizer: the EQ does not have any presets and practically it forces you to work and build an EQ setting which you can name and save. But the unique feature comes in just about now: everybody knows how and EQ-curve looks like...most commonly met look more or less like a V-shaped slope with 3 to 31 bands, each band's gain/cut being determined by the position of a cursor. Therefore, between different cursors we are going to have a slight difference: well, moving another (horizontal) cursor on a slidebar will alter these present differences in both way, either nerfing or increasing this difference on a very scientific and exact basis, thus offering you unlimited possibilities to tweak the sound only by mathematically amplifying the difference of each band's gains.
The DeliPlayer won't need additional plugins for smoothly passing from one file to another in some 4 different modalities: seamless, x-fade, fadeout and delay allowing for a technically gapless playback, perfectly fit for parties and even radio stations alike. Needless to say that DeliPlayer sports even a 4-mode repeat section which lets you even ignore some tracks :)
The spectrum analyzer is a ?ping-pong?-type one: I called it so because instead it has a window with one cursor/marker established at a certain point and the spectrum-graphics ?flowing? at its left, the DeliPlayer features a moving marker which sweeps in between the margins of the screen and leaves visual info behind, erasing it at the next pass. Needless to say that DeliPlayer will at any time reside in the system tray...speaking of this feature has reminded me of a thing I almost forgot of: the extreme customization will even let you decide which keys or key-combos will trigger certain commands or events.
For example, I have set the Num Del key to trigger the ?minimize-to-tray? action and it works perfectly and very fast as well: at the moment I push the key, the DeliPlayer instantly disappears ? only to come back to the desktop at the next push. The master volume can be easily adjusted with the Num ? and + keys and so on, depending on your preferences and the way you work with the PC. Unfortunately (yet expectable), because there is such a word present in my article, these keys or combinations of keys risk of interfering with your work and instead of saving, the Ctrl+S combo was just stopping playback even though DeliPlayer was running in the tray-mode and I was writing.
I should stop here writing DeliPlayer or else this will become a boring long lecture for you, my dear readers and I really intend not to transform describing this awesome player in a rather nasty thing. As my final words before I will speak my conclusions I'll just say that you can listen to internet radio stations even if it doesn't look like you could (as it also happened to me): just right-click and go in the Edit menu: there you'll quickly see what's to be done for listening your fav music over the internet.
DeliPlayer may not sport fancy ShoutCast or heavy 3D-design, nor will it burn CDs for you; you'll have to put up some serious mental effort to learn and remember the basic settings but believe 2 things I'm telling you right now: things with DeliPlayer are really simpler than you might think and the other ? when you'll hear the awesome quality of your fav tracks played in DeliPlayer with the ?wide stereo? option on you'll agree with me that it really IS a worthy piece of code. Personally, I can hardly wait to get home and give it a spin at ?high voltage?!
The Good
Briefly said, together with my 24-bit Audigy2 ZS soundcard and high-end Sennheiser headphones the DeliPlayer has practically spoiled me with the best sounding music I have ever heard so far in my long years of audio. Another simply stunning feature is the massive filetype-support: 230 and even more (you can easily add new filetypes) means a damn good engine! The rest ... you'll tell me.
The Bad
The only not-just-perfect thing is that the shortcuts affect other Windows applications even if the DeliPlayer is not focused on. Should this be mended (and I am confident it will soon) then it could easily become one of the best music players around.
The Truth
Truth is dead-simple: the best-sounding, most feature-loaded, well-priced (even for the Pro version which sells at the same price as Winamp) software music player I HAVE EVER ENCOUNTERED! As a SoftPedia.com insider, I'll unveil that a Foobar fan (our branche's mobiles fellow) and a Winamp fan (myself) have discovered today the dawn of a new era: the DeliPlayer era.
Click on the thumbnails below to see the screenshots I prepared for you:
