Quintessential: Highly customizable and extensible media player

by Simon Kerbel Jan 25th 2008

Quintessential Music Player aims to be your one-and-only digital music jukebox and library. With its small footprint, skinnable interface, plug-in architecture, and wealth of support for all digital media formats, Quintessential is quite a suitor.

Here are the highlights:

Playback
Quintessential supports a massive variety of popular audio and video file types, including mp3, mp3 PRO, Ogg Vorbis, WMA , CD, ASX, AU, and much more

Ripping and Encoding
You can convert your CD audio or existing media files into any digital audio format, including Ogg Vorbis, LAME, WMA, etc...

Gracenote CDDB Support
The Quintessential Player uses the Gracenote CDDB Music Recognition Service to fill in artist, album and song info. But if you really want to get detailed, you can expand the incoming data to include up to 30 fields, such as track-level songwriting, production, playing credits, release date, label, genre, and more.

Extensible, open architecture
Quintessential is a small package; the developers wanted it that way. Once Quintessential is installed, however, you can customize and add on to the player to your heart's content. Add visualizers, custom skins, language packs, specific audio encoders (such as LAME), library/playlist functions, all available as free plug-ins from the Quintessential website.

Quintessential Player is a free download for Microsoft Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, and Vista. Build 120, just released, adds some bug fixes and new plugins.

Tags: freeware, gracenote, music player, MusicPlayer, quintessential

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Kevin said 6:09PM on 1-25-2008

Any media player is worthless to me if it doesn't have the simple "Remember Playback Position" feature. It's beyond me how a feature as simple as this isn't included in every player. You'll see hundreds of complicated options and lots of depth, but something useful as this in audio and especially video files isn't included as an option.

It's not even included in Windows Media Player! You have to download separate plugins. And even then they make you manually create a bookmark..it's not an automatic thing when you just want to close the player and open it back up in order to restart at the place you left off.

The only players that I've seen do this reliably are iTunes and Zoom Player. iTunes is too bloated to use as an every day player though, so I use Zoom Player for the most part.

I wanted to email microsoft today about this but after frustratingly wading through the myriad of pages they lead you through before getting to a proper support page, they wanted to charge me to email them the suggestion since it's officially under the 'support' banner. Great way to keep your finger on the pulse there MS.

Franklin said 8:23PM on 1-25-2008

Kevin,

I know Miro has the feature you describe. Not sure, but maybe VLC does, too (since Miro's video playback component is VLC code).

While I think it's great to see so many media player choices, I'm hard pressed to find what sets one apart from another, except for having a shinier skin. At this point, a free, non-crippled featured media player would stand out if it could successfully play back Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

Chris said 1:04AM on 1-26-2008

Wow. I'm disappointed. This player hasn't been updated since 2004. At one point it was a major player against Winamp... back in the Winamp 2.0 era. But those days are long gone.

Theres nothing special about this player... Honestly, this sounds like a paid review. Is Download Squad doing SEO for Quinnware now?

andy h said 4:00AM on 1-26-2008

@ chris: Development Release 21/01/2008 !
qmp was my favourite mp3 player over years. really one of the best players around.
but finally i switched to media monkey 3. media monkey rocks!

shelley said 6:57AM on 1-26-2008

tried using Quintessential but i prefer other players for no particular reason

Shelley from SuTree

Relayer said 10:32AM on 1-26-2008

I agree with what most of what you have to say. I use and have used Quint for years as an MP3 tag editor. I highly recommend it if you haven't tried it. Just highlight your tracks, right click to edit and it will do cddb tag editing. You can set up the editor to tag in any config you want. What's cool is if tags are not the way you want them but all the info is there, you can commit the editor to change the tag to your liking with one click. Plus you can bulk tag! I burn cds regularly and download music and often times I don't get the tags the way I prefer. Quint is small, fast and a useful tool in this regard, try it out some time. Please comment if you have a tool you use for tagging that we might enjoy as well.

Mikkel said 12:30PM on 1-26-2008

As Andy said, no player comes close to MediaMonkey 3, I can't tell you how many times I've found myself wishing for a certain functionality, only to discover it's already there seconds later.

Simon Kerbel said 4:02PM on 1-29-2008

Chris:
As another reviewer pointed out, development for the Quintessential Player is ongoing, with the latest build released January 21st of this year.
Shelley:
We're glad you tried it out, and we're glad that you have the freedom to choose whatever media player you prefer. Isn't this a great country?
Thanks for the comments guys!
Simon
Download Squad

Syahid A. said 9:48PM on 1-29-2008

Still my favorite player over the years. Eons better than WinAmp.

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