Quintessential Player 4.51

Publisher's description of Quintessential Player

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Quintessential Player is a fully skinnable audio player that uses a plug-in architecture, allowing it to be as simple or as feature-laden as you like. Go for a minimal installation to preserve system resources, or add a variety of visualizers, library functions, DSP filters, language packs, and other plug-ins to extend the player's capabilities. Quintessential Player has full support for most popular audio formats, including MP3, MP3 Pro, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, and Windows Media. Other convenient features include CD ripping, MP3 encoding, cross-fading, and CDDB integration. Also, Quintessential allows you to listen to streaming audio from broadcasters such as Shoutcast and Icecast.

Version 4.51 adds video support, new plug-in types, new skinning features, improved CD ripping and encoding, simultaneous audio playback while ripping CDs, and an updated interface.

See more CNET content tagged:

streaming audio,

CD,

MP3,

video

Editor's review of Quintessential Player

Other players may receive more attention, but it's hard to beat Quintessential Player's efficiency, stability, and flexibility. Easily customizable and built to support almost any plug-in, this freeware tool just added a fine video player. CD-ripping and MP3-converting features increase the program's value without bloat.

The stylish interface includes a lot of sensibly set hot keys, making playback and music management a no-click affair. It also is completely skinnable, with plenty of designs created by a large community of developers and fans. The extremely helpful Quintessential Player Web site provides a library of optional tools and full developer kits for creating your own skins or plug-ins. Our only beef is that you can only exit the full-screen-video mode through the right-click context menu, whereas the other functions have buttons that appear when you hover your cursor at the bottom of the screen. Quintessential Player takes up less memory than Winamp, making it a smart choice for performance-conscious users.

User reviews of Quintessential Player

• Average user rating: out of 350 votes
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  Quintessential Player

  Same Features as the previous Quintessential Version ...

  by: praveen360 on 19-Mar-2006 08:29:19 AM

  Pros: I tried this Version last year by downloading from the Quintessential Website. This product is OK. Donot Try the "Quintessential Media Player Beta" (QMP 107) which was still in Development. It consumes all the resources of CPU.

  The nice features of Quintessential Player (QCD 451) includes

  + Consumes Low Memory & CPU Resources, yet produces good sound quality.

  + You can USE it Instead of HEAVY Windows Media Player.

  Cons: - Not recommeded if you are already using QCD 4.50, Try WinAmp 4.2 New Release Instead.

  - You can TRY installing WinAmp "Lite"

  + When WinAmp is Installed as "LITE" It consumes LOW Memory & just 0% - 3% of CPU.

  + WinAmp had many Addons which can improve Sound Quality @ the expense of System Resources.

  Was this review helpful? Yes | No (18 of 28 users said yes)

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  Quintessential Player

  Not quite what's promised

  by: SceptreX on 09-May-2007 02:47:55 PM

  Pros: It's a media player at under 5 megabytes, and some of the skins out there are cool. It works reliably and just as well as anything else.

  Cons: See that whole "It works faster than Winamp" thing? Forget it. I did a test, with both programs running at the same time (what a racket) and while my Winamp (which had several setting turned off, such as smoothness of the skin or whatnot) was around 0 percent CPU usage, Quint topped at around 20, jumping between that and 5. I've got a dump of a computer, but still; that's a fifth of my computer for music alone.

  And if you have big collections, this is useless: it just piles everything into one big playlist, with hard to browse buttons that do little to help find songs. If you want ease of use, look elsewhere.

  I think that you should just get MediaMonkey or Winamp; the size difference isn't that big, but they work for a variety of people. This, however, isn't worth dealing with.

  Was this review helpful? Yes | No (8 of 10 users said yes)

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  Quintessential Player

  highly recommend

  by: barakat_khaled on 28-Oct-2006 01:43:45 PM

  Pros: great fast nice player with many file types support

  Cons: didn't open realplayer files others do now

  Was this review helpful? Yes | No (4 of 6 users said yes)

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  Quintessential Player

  Quiet Warrior

  by: dragonquest on 27-Aug-2006 10:28:12 PM

  Pros: The player pretty much lives upto its name - its pretty perfect in what it does. Firstly, it supports a lot of formats. Plus the interface is just awesome. Its clean and useful. Not too much glitter and still fairly functional and good looking. A good example is the little search bar at the bottom of the playlist. You do not have to bring up a new window to do the searching. The player is quite popular so has a good collection of skins and plugins. The sound quality is pretty good and its not very taxing on the system.

  Cons: It would be nice to include a media library function for easier music management. Plus some built in radio stations (like Winamp uses Shoutcast) wouldn't hurt.

  Was this review helpful? Yes | No (4 of 5 users said yes)

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  Quintessential Player

  the best sounds..

  by: veentampa on 10-Jun-2006 09:46:33 PM

  Pros: this small player has the best audio sound that i've heard.. nice volume , clear sound.. i dont use it for video i use zoomplayer and this for audio. great combo low memory usage.. just how i like it

  Cons: none.. great audio player..

  Was this review helpful? Yes | No (4 of 8 users said yes)

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