14 DAY TRIAL // There are a lot of good, very good and excellent audio players. Some of them are popular, some are not. Usually, most are not free, and that's why I thought of testing two free ones head to head. Then I changed my mind and increased that figure to three, just to end up doing a compared review using four free audio players...
Maybe some of you would like to see Winamp in here too, but it's not going to be. Winamp is perhaps the most used player on the planet (at least most of the people I know are using it), it has its drawbacks and strong points, but its place is not here. I am trying to give you four alternatives to it to choose from. The fight will take place here, and the program you consider your favorite after reading this article will face Winamp or your other favorite player on your home computer.
I hope you all agree with my terms. If you do, just check the "Agree" radio button and let's move on!
jetAudio 6.2.6 Basic
I guess that jetAudio is the subject with most features available, but I can't say that yet. This free Basic version lacks some features available in the Pro one, but will these make it lose much?
I am not going to tell you about all the features of this program, but I will only point out those interesting for the end user looking for a great free audio player.
Its interface is skinnable and easy to use. The GUI is usually a minor problem, at least for me, when it's about audio players - I don't need to have my player on the screen, I just need it to play music, and do it right!
After you install jetAudio, you will notice that it installs an explorer shell extension. Just choose jetAudio>Play with jetAudio from your music folder's contextual menu!
What about some technical stuff? Sure, right away! This basic version allows using 64bit floating point MP3 decoding to get the best out of your music files, it can stop playback if you're running low on power and supports multichannel sound. Believe me, the quality difference after enabling these is at least "noticeable"!
What else do we need from an audio player? Playlist management, equalizer with included presets, audio encoding, even audio broadcast, they are all here! Unfortunately, the 32bit audio output and the special sound effects are not available in the free version.
Let's see...did I forget about the Lyrics Viewer? Visualizations? Who needs visualizations? Timer and alarm clock? Don't worry; they are here, even more. Worth trying, for sure!
Unfortunately, I can't say that the basic version of jetAudio is an excellent audio player, just because it's missing audio output features, but it's still a very good one (you can even watch movies or DVDs with it, but I am not interested in those extra features now).
What I don't like with jetAudio? The playlist manager and the album manager can't be docked to the main window and are not using the same skin as the player.
What I like? The rest of it!
Why try it? I think that even without the Pro features, it can be a worthy free audio player, fast and reliable, but only your ears can decide that!
jetAudio Basic at work:
What is a cube? Usually, the cube is a three-dimensional Platonic solid composed of six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. A lot of other geometrical forms can be built starting with a cube or inside it. Where's the link with the audio players?
musikCube is one of those programs with a simple interface, a bit uncommon in the audio players family, but that shouldn't be such a big problem. Let's check it out!
To me, musikCube seems more like a music manager with an audio player included rather than the other way around. I was very surprised to see that it only supports MP3 and OGG files, but there's more than this, as I was expecting.
To extend the features of the program you can download additional plugins from the website. There's no question about their price - everything's for free, of course! What can be added using these plugins? Let's see...First of all, additional file formats supported: FLAC, MPC, MOD, WAV, AAC or WMA. Now, that's much better! Besides new file types supported, there is a shutdown timer, playlist import/export or alarm play just like in jetAudio.
But what about the basic features? Well, there are enough to point out in this category here.
You can award ratings to your songs, use the equalizer to tune your sound , listen to Internet radio stations, generate individual music libraries for each one of your partitions or take advantage of the automatically generated playlists based on your behavior (50 last played or 50 newest, 10 most played, favorite artist or favorite album).
To draw the line, I have to say the most amazing thing for me was the sound quality. You couldn't expect too much from a player with almost no sound settings to tune, except its equalizer, but musikCube does its job extremely well. A bit uninspired in terms of UI, great sound quality, plugins, CD ripper, automatically generated playlists... this is a good player and it gets better each week, being frequently updated, so keep your eyes and ears on it!
What I don't like? As I said with jetAudio, the interface shouldn't be the first thing to have in mind when judging an audio player... but with musikCube I can't ignore this fact.
What I like? Sound quality, its 8/16 band equalizer and the automatically generated playlists, but let's not forget about the free plugins for this nice little free program!
Why use it? musikCube is small, fast, reliable, and does what it should: plays music!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
foobar2000... is this a player from the past or what? It seems not, its latest version still needs some time to cool down, being recently released. For many people this is a favorite, and that made me curious. Let's dig in!
First, the interface: nothing special about it, looks a bit like musikCube, but there's something else behind it, of course. There is a spartan toolbar with the play controls, the main area that contains the tracks from the playlist and the menus.
Foobar is very easy to operate, so the things I have to check with it are two: file support and available features.
Let's start with the files that can be played with Foobar2000. After checking the list... all I can say is that you shouldn't have any problem with the files you want to play, since it supports all popular file types, including AAC, FLAC or MP4.
Features, features, features! If a program has a weak interface but great features it can gain a lot of supporters, especially if it's about a player. I am looking through the Preferences area now and I will tell you what seems interesting there...
Even if it doesn't support skins, you can customize the way this player displays the main window as much as you want. Fonts, background colors and text formatting can be changed using scripting. Everything can be done from the Preferences window, of course.
To improve user interaction, new keyboard shortcuts can be added and the existing ones can be edited or removed.
Media management is another strong point that can be found in foobar. Users with huge playlists will be extremely happy with this.
Finally, advanced audio features! We can prevent clipping, control the preamp level and there are also some sound processing modules available!
There is also a file converter that supports advanced customization, and when it's about the hidden features, I have only one for you: those who think their hard drive should be spared from too many read accesses or listen to music from optical media can enable full file buffering and their problem will be gone!
What I don't like? The main interface is so minimized in features, that it lacks even the volume control!
What I like? foobar is extremely customizable, maybe too customizable for beginners, and its open component architecture allows third party developers to add their own features.
Why choose it? If you're a power user and you don't have it, get it now! If you are a beginner, then you better check out the head and the tail of this audio player quartet...
See foobar at work:
Is this for real? It's free, looks great and it's huge when it comes to complexity. I think that even Winamp looks like a mystery to absolute beginners... for the first minutes.
In the meantime I managed to solve my spatial orientation problem (I don't like players that have so many features that you must look around for more than a minute to figure out how to add new files, for example). Quintessential has three interface display modes: full, medium and small. I am switching to medium mode and I'll keep it that way until the end of this test. In order to make your life easier I suggest that you do the same.
But what do we have here? Is this a Winamp clone? No, not at all, we have a player of its own. A good free player, I dare to say.
Files supported? Most audio and video files, and the list can be extended through the use of additional plugins.
Skins? No problem apart from the fact that it comes with only one skin, the default one, but there are hundreds of them waiting to be downloaded.
Sound quality? Excellent, and I must add that some of the configuration windows look like those to be found in Winamp, so the migration can be easy. Why migrate? Why not? Our lives are short, it's better to try as much as possible in every field, and I am not the one to use same program for a lifetime, even if it's the best in the field.
Additional features? Yes, sir! Quintessential has a built in media library with a lot of useful features (it can sort the tracks from your playlist based on all tag information and more), it can be used as a ripper and encoder and let's not forget about the additional plugins.
The Tag and File Editor is one of the best that I have seen so far. It allows you to edit standard tag information as well as adding lyrics, artwork and comments or use templates for renaming (of course you can also customize those templates or add new ones, don't worry).
What I don't like? The full interface is too much for my taste, but leaving that behind, the program proves to be unstable in some cases. It crashed on me once, but when trying to make it crash again I didn't succeed...
What I like? It's free, it has a lot of skins and plugins available and sounds great. It doesn't have any Pro version so it can't get better than this... but let's wait for the future versions...
Why choose it? A friend of mine told me about it five months ago and I used it for a short time, but it can't replace jetAudio Pro. When it comes to the freebies that we've checked today, it's head to head with jetAudio Basic. This version is a big improvement over previous ones, so you should give it a try!
Quintessential's essentials:
Do we have a winner? I am not sure about that, I guess we have two pairs that finished the race head to head.
First, we have jetAudio Basic and Quintessential and second we have foobar and musikCube. The gap that separates them is not that large, but draws a line between beginners and advanced users.
In the end, the choice will be yours, but I hope you will have fun checking out these programs and choosing the one that's better for you.
Enjoy them and don't forget to pump up the volume!
