14 DAY TRIAL // I really don't know what made me pick this little player for today's first review: to be true, I had seen a thumbnail and it was really appealing with its shady, neat, XP looks, while it also seemed to be a pretty interesting piece of code.
One more music player around, simple yet sounding good, completely free and running on low system resources, the X-SOFT Media Player can deliver a good experience for those who decide to give it a spin. While perfectly fit for systems with low performances because of its small size and rather ?shy" requirements, the X-SOFT Media Player will surely work just perfect on very fast and high-end systems as well.
The Looks
As I told you already, simple looks - simple does. Of course this isn't by far an established principle, especially when it comes to the IT world, since there are many examples which totally prove the opposite.
Nevertheless, in the case of X-SOFT Media Player, this applies perfectly as this time, as both the looks and the works are dead-simple. X-SOFT Media Player is made of one small playlist window and an even smaller command-window. The default graphic style is iron-grey, with a polished, 3D very pleasant yet functional look. Everything is minimalist and this is easily noticed when loading tracks with long names in the playlist: the list can't have its size modified and this means being rather annoying sometimes. I personally did not like that - as you load multiple files in the playlist and thus create the need for a scrollbar - this scrollbar is not at all skinned, having instead a default XP-style which looks very crappy-like inserted there.
The buttons are all round and darker than the rest of the interface, with very visible and intuitive white classic markings (triangle for play, square for stop and so on). No other visual element is present in X-SOFT Media Player, except for a small screen in which sequentially flashes info on the currently playing track: artist, song title, time and the ?Developed by X-SOFT" tag.
The seekbar and the volume bar were rather hard to spot and I have seen them just after I stared for about 1 minute at the X-SOFT Media Player's GUI and observed nothing; then I decided to play some song and only after this was I able to see them. They are 2 thin lines with just fill-in and no cursor and really are a bit difficult to use.
I left the coolest graphic thing for the final of the "Looks" chapter as it is also the nicest thing this program has whatsoever: remember I told you about 2 windows, top - commands, bottom - playlist. Well, sometimes you just want to move the X-SOFT Media Player's position on your desktop, provided you are not running it in the minimized mode. Well, I assume you'll click and drag the header window until it reaches the desired location. Nothing special so far, but at the moment you stop clicking and release the mouse button, the playlist will follow the exact moves of your cursor.
I was first rather shocked as I didn't want to believe my eyes; after repeated tests with very complex moves at various speeds I saw that this was true: no matter how you move your mouse and how long (I've tested the feature with an overall 40 seconds movement), the playlist will replicate the trace at the same coordinates and speeds. Cool thing as we all in Softpedia had quite an amused laugh. Then I noticed that animation had its own menu and one could also set the playlist movement to the X and Y, thus restricting the move to the 2 directions and shortening the "road" of the playlist. It was really nice and fun, but this was all...
The Works
Little will I say here, as the X-SOFT Media Player is a software rather based on looks and less task-oriented. It will play WAV, OGG and MP3 files, but not CDA, much to my despair. I can't really understand why software producers won't implement audio CD playback in their creations no matter how small and simple or large and complex!
Returning to the X-SOFT Media Player, it does not sport any visual enhancement such as a small FFT analyzer as sometimes encountered in similar programs or other visualizations; simplicity went so far that it does not have an EQ even so you just have to rely on the quality of the tracks you're about to play. The X-SOFT Media Player has no shortcuts and no minimize-to-tray and this also is a reason for some discomfort at times. It supports drag and drop, but only for files and not for directories, but the playlist is administrable by means of the Del key, as most decent softwares also feature and besides the add/remove buttons, it also has a "remove all" button which can come in very handy as multiple file-selection inside the playlist is not available.
Overall, the X-SOFT Media Player is a pretty decent music player, even if I can't understand where did "media" come from, since it just runs with the above-mentioned three file formats.
The Good
It looks nice, small and cozy and it is very easy to use; the "follow the header" animation is very funny.
The Bad
Very few file formats are supported; it has no shortcuts and will not run in system tray.
The Truth
If a totally non-pretentious music player which runs on almost no system resources is what you need, then X-SOFT Media Player is the thing for you.
Please check the few screenshots available (and truly possible) for X-SOFT Media Player:
