Quintessential Media Player

Well, Quinnware has released has released a new beta media player called “Quintessential Media Player” [QMP]. Quintessential Player [QCD], their standard music player provided on that site, is a very competent freeware Winamp-style music player. Heck, I even made a rather succesful skin for it [woo – 9000 downloads]. Personally QCD is my favourite music player out there.

Now, however, they’ve released a new beta player that’s more akin to Foobar/WMP, with a far more advanced playlist system, and a far more developped video player.

That said, the video player is still not anywhere nearly as fully-featured as dedicated movie players such as Media Player Classic or VideoLAN. It’s more comparable to Windows Media Player or RealPlayer in terms of its pretty-interface meets lack-of-features.

Another thing that I don’t like of this new beta “Quintessential Media Player” is the “music browser” system, which sends your tracks over to the Gracenote website, and then retrieves an information page on the album being played. I really don’t like this dependance on an internet connection, nor the commercialisation aspects of such an addition.

All good things must come to an end, and I suspect that QMP signals the end of an efficient, free, versatile, minimalist music player that was QCD. This is sort of akin to the jump of WinAmp 2.x to WinAmp 5.x for those who are geeky enough to know what I mean.

Update: It’s occured to me that maybe I was too harsh on QMP. It still is a decent player, the default skin is much prettier than the default skin for QCD, and I suspect that the plugins between QCD and QMP are fully compatible (same underlying engine).

It still beats WinAmp, and blows Windows Media Player out of the water, esp. since it adds support for external devices (ie. portable MP3 players) as well as a self-maintained rating system for your music.

Update: It’s been 3 months since I wrote this review, and QMP has become my main music player. In that time, I really haven’t been hindered by the programs intermingling with the Internet, and I find that the introduced tweaks and features make this player quite superior to its predecessor.