Filed under: Audio, Windows, Freeware
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.
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