14 DAY TRIAL // What?
When it comes to music players, from time to time, some people might be looking for really cute software. Not professional, no fancy looks, no exquisite features, less greedy with the computer's resources and definitely no charge for using it. At the same time, assets like the ease of use and compactness are more than welcome.
Why?
This is why software producers are constantly developing completely free programs in which they strive to combine the essential works of common players while retaining the very simplicity that drove their ideas before. I must admit that I have seen rather few players which had it all; of course this "it all" is a figure of speech: no player can "have it all" when it's about features AND looks AND small size AND ease of use AND tag editors and so on.
Who?
But this doesn't necessarily mean that there are no programs which are "within striking distance". The Naevius Cached MP3 Player is the living proof that, with just a little more effort and concern, things can go very very well: it is small, it has a really cute GUI, it also has the basic sine qua non features and, some of them, are really way cooler than what one might find in other higher-class softwares.
The Looks and Works
Naevius Cached MP3 Player is a one-window software and, believe it or not, I started to like this kind of compact-oriented thinking, especially in a music player. As I wrote the subtitle of this review and thought about "the litest" I believed this was a good term; now I am no longer sure that it's that good. Naevius Cached MP3 Player is looks so simple and, at the same time, it has such a nice appearance that only now have I understood the beauty of its simplicity: a grey polished metal background with minimal detail and just slightly 3D buttons.
No skins, no color profile and no way to alter that. Actually, the graphic design of the Naevius Cached MP3 Player is almost Spartan, yet offering lots of info on what's going on: elapsed and total time, samplerate and bitrate, stereo/mono mode, number of tracks in the playlist and cache status. And if we made it to the cache-thing, it's time to speak about one nice and really useful feature: Naevius Cached MP3 Player pre-loads mp3 songs from a CD in a temp file on your HDD, thus limiting the strain on both your disc and drive. Rather than spinning the disc like crazy, the software caches the data on the hard drive and plays it back from there. Sounds really interesting...
The Naevius Cached MP3 Player sports a very handy EQ, working on 10 frequencies with some very nice presets and even 3 SFX: echo, reverb and flanger. Well, to tell you the truth, the flanger is actually a phaser and it has no control while echo and reverb have both one "main mix" level bar. All these 4 DSP options can be bypassed, so there's really a possibility here!
About half the size of the main window is dedicated to the playlist. A very simple playlits that is, with little-to-none control other than the classic stuff. One peculiar thing is that the user doesn't need to doubleclick the tracks to play them: one click is just enough. Unfortunately, this operation mode does not allow the re-ordering of songs after you loaded them as no move up/down options are present. One cool thing is that Naevius Cached MP3 Player, despite his smallness and simplicity, is able to both save and load playlists in the M3U and PLS format.
As play-modes the Naevius Cached MP3 Player supports the repeat and shuffle mode. For a very brief period of time, at the bottom of the windows, the Cache Status bar flashes as it loads up the next song; really brief, as I had to try 4 times to get a snapshot of its progress.
The single brightly-colored spot in all Naevius Cached MP3 Player's GUI is the really lovely and pro-looking VU-meter. A 25-band analog LED-style VU-meter bridge as one can only see now on mixing consoles in really serious recording studios. 16 LEDs (11 green, 4 yellow and 1 red) indicate the level on 25 separate bands, while "white lights" indicate the peak and hold. While good-looking, this VU-meter bridge also has a very fast and (to my greatest surprise) accurate reaction. As you hit the Pause button, it quickly shuts down and then rapidly comes back to life when the playback starts again. Consecuently, this is really one of the best VU-meters I saw lately.
Overall, I can't say I missed the complete absence of menus and other options in the Naevius Cached MP3 Player; the moment one understands the purpose and reason of such a software, it quickly becomes very clear that this one really rocks.
The Good
Naevius Cached MP3 Player is painfully simple in both looks and works, technically fit for any PC and offering more than one (at least at a first glance) could think of; plus the drag and drop support!
The Bad
A minimize to tray button is badly needed!
The Truth
One of the best small mp3 players I have seen. A bit more work and the price would be more justified. As for the readers: you must definitely give it a spin!
See the few images that I managed to capture with Naevius Cached MP3 Player at work:
