14 DAY TRIAL // There are few music players who totally rule the world's PCs and nothing can change this as programs like Foobar, Winamp, Windows Media Player (just to name the most popular) will still be in the first positions in people?s preferences. There also are softwares which try to replicate the success and features, looks and works of such leading code and get their share of the market as well; some manage to produce good results while others fail and almost all that gets out is mediocre if not even very lousy results. Still there isn't a perfect recipe for a perfect software music player and almost any good program has its pros and cons and the supporters of each claim that the code they're running is the best, which obviously is one subjective piece of judgement...
MusikCube is a software whose developers decided to follow the Foobar path and - in my opinion - they have indeed followed it very closely and obtained a GPL (General Public License) software with good looks and good sound and even more, close-to-excellent functionality, thus becoming a possible ?threat? for the leaders of the industry. Without being too fancy (or worse ? claiming to be), MusikCube has made me listen to my fav music for more time than I needed to review it... and that's one rare thing, believe me! Let's pass further on and see what's going on!
The Looks
Those who already know Foobar or are acquainted to media libraries will easily get used to MusikCube. This doesn't mean that people who are usually Winamp users will find MusikCube one hard to use and understand software; even people who see such a program for the first time will tend to like it because of the very intuitive and ordered GUI.
MusikCube may look like an over-enhanced Windows Explorer window: separate fields, browsing regions, drop down tasks and so on, all really coherent with the way Win XP looks. MusikCube does not exactly have a skin or color-scheme: it actually looks like the traditional Windows interface, but with slightly different accents, different icons (more Vista than XP) and a general more tidy and stylish appearance.
Almost every field can be resized, so you can obtain a vast array of looks within the same UI. The user can easily access the whole library, the Now Playing, Search, Net Radio, drives-list, playlists and dynamic playlist with one single click as all these are docking and undocking according to wish. The library, which is the most important element in your music navigation, will display the artists, their respective albums and all the songs comprised there.
The playlist is in the middle of the window (which by the way can be extended to full screen if need be) and it usually displays the songs available in a selected album. You can have a better picture of how things are by accessing the Now Playing menu, which actually displays the traditional playlist we've all been used to see, meaning a truly complete list with the songs loaded in the MusikCube and highlighting the one which runs at a certain time.
The command buttons are grouped in the lower left side, in row with the very intuitive and convenient seekbar. These buttons also contain the crossfade, EQ, repeat and random triggers so you don't need to access some other menus to get to these settings. The time counter is special and innovative in the MusikCube: the elapsed time is displayed on the left side of the seekbar, while the total playing time of a track is in the opposite side, thus being quite readable and handy. The volume bar may have been placed better and even more visible, but I guess time and future versions will mend this. Finally, the EQ can be docked in almost any part of the main window or simply left aside and even hidden at all.
The entire MusikCube has a rather minimalist design as the developers themselves stated that they wanted a very good looking interface, without being eye candy, so it won't consume too much of the system resources; which we must admit, is a very thoughtful way to judge things!
The Works
I'll start the tech-y part of this article with the thing that has impressed me most: the EQ; and I'll tell you briefly the story. As I first started the MusikCube, I noticed the EQ button and - of course - I pressed it? just to hear the way sound became really bad and then I thought to myself that this EQ was one of the dumbest setups I had met so far. Really no hint was present to guide me and explain or let me access the equalizer's settings. It was after some good minutes of pushing and pressing all the buttons and tabs when I finally learned the ways of this feature.
The EQ-window popped up and I noticed that all the 6 bands and the preamp sliders were at 100%, so there was technically no chance for the sound to be good whatsoever! Tweaking a bit the sound revealed the most interesting of the discoveries related to the MusikCube: the EQ, despite the fact that small number of bands, worked amazingly, covering a range between 55Hz and 19.9 kHz, not operating strictly on the specified frequencies but rather covering up some neighbor-frequencies as well. Thus, the (always very good quality) audio I was listening to could be enhanced even more, as both the soundcard and especially the headphones allowed and supported this. Truly rocking sound!
One other cool feature was the built-in CD ripper offering output in FLAC, OGG and of course, MP3; an integrated tag editor will considerably ease your work, for ID3 v.1 and v.2 are both supported. You can easily edit the track info, so indeed this CD-ripper could replace other softwares you might use as it is precise and fast and the output files sound really good.
Setting up the libraries is pretty easy and the whole process won't take long no matter how much audio could you have on your drives; the MusikCube is very quick indeed at this indexing operation. The Devices menu will let you access your HDD in just instants and the Explorer-like panes will display the stored music so you can drag it to playlists or directly play it. Advanced and very useful features such as Enqueue, Enqueue and move as next or Enqueue and play help you enrich your MusikCube experience and at the same time allow you to create the exact playlists and audio sequences that you like.
Even more, you can use the MusikCube for online radio content and also use it to search for certain audio on you PC: the Search functional will find your media in just a few moments and, frankly, it is way faster than Windows Explorer or other traditional methods, because of one simple reason - it will search in audio media only, thus the results will come much sooner. The dynamic playlists will give you data on a vast type of items such as the 50 last played songs, 50 newest, 10 most played, favorite artist/song/album. As I guess you expected, you can easily rate your fav songs so others can find out your preferences and so on.
Finally, some more little things which contribute to a full and rich media experience complete the picture of the intricate workings of MusikCube: the ballon which announces the new playing track and the album it's from, the excellent and configurable cross-fading between the songs, the system tray actions... Hoping I have convinced you to download MusikCube and give it a thorough spin, I'll end with a rather peculiar thing: the shortcuts are totally weird, being in the form of Alt+Ctrl+Numpad keys! I'll let you discover further aspects of this altogether very good player by yourselves...
The Good
Overall, the MusikCube is a very good player and - if I just add the CD-ripper, the very good-working EQ, the fast searching power and the low resources it runs on - we get one serious player!
The Bad
The only thing that hindered me was the totally uncanny set of shortcuts.
The Truth
My truth is that MusikCube is really one music player to be considered when speaking about elite players.
Take a look at the screenshots below as you give MusikCube a thorough run:
