AlbumPlayer 5.0a

Major Fucntions:

Browse your albums by categories like Artist, Genre, Composer, etc. Create your own custom collections like 'My favourites'. Get a clear overview of your music by having the album covers right at hand on a clean interface. Open an album to see all tracks, etc. as if you opened a real CD case. Vary the style by selecting the jewelcase, the CD bag or the vinyl sleeve. The album grid can show four cover sizes, up to 256x256 pixels. Enjoy a fancy look even if some covers are missing.

Tired of endless track lists? Want more visuals and easy navigation? Good! The AlbumPlayer offers a nice booklet, where all information comes together on four different pages.

(1) Track page: Select tracks to play or to add them to the playlist. If no track is selected, you can handle the whole album at once. You can also reach the album editor from here to maintain your album.

(2) Album page: Read (previously stored) album-related text like reviews, release year, comments, etc.

(3) Artist page: Read stored artist information like biography, date of birth, country, language, etc. Very handy on this page are the pre-configured links to several artist information sources, like Wikipedia and last.fm. Store a link to the artist's homepage. Enjoy unlimited artist pictures that can be stored as easily as copy-&-paste from your web browser.

(4) Rating page: Quickly rate multiple tracks or the whole album at once. Just click on the stars and you’re done.

You can now rate currently playing tracks/albums with just two clicks and you can ban annoying tracks you will never hear them again until you unban or play them intentionally. Take advantage of the built-in equalizer and the normalization (replay gain), which adjusts the playback volume of all tracks to one average level. You can shuffle your playlist, but you can shuffle your whole database or the currently opened collection, too. Whenever the playlist comes to an end, fresh tracks are added, based on lots of filter parameters. You'll never run out of music. The mini window allows convenient control, although other applications stay in foreground - automatic (dis)appearance can be set up. Customizable hotkeys got implemented. Adjustable crossfading and autorepeat are on-hand.

The AlbumPlayer supports ASIO (Audio Stream Input/Output), which is a soundcard driver protocol for digital audio, providing a low-latency and high fidelity interface to the soundcard, bypassing the Windows mixer and drivers. In ASIO mode all AlbumPlayer audio processing is bypassed. Audio files will be played bit-perfect. Every bit of your high quality audio file is brought unchanged to the output of your soundcard. If you connect your amplifier using S/PDIF (an optical connection), your audio file arrives unchanged at the DAC (Digital Analog Converter) of your amplifier.

From bigger buttons via reversible item selection to an integrated onscreen keyboard - the touch mode offers the best interface and behaviour to give your mouse a break while selecting music. This is also an advantage if you like to use the AlbumPlayer as front end of a Car PC. The minimum screen resolution needed is 800x480 pixels. We recommend 1024x768 for best experience. Due to bigger playlist items, you can hide the cover of the currently playing track/album.

The Collection Editor is the core of your AlbumPlayer, it provides access to your database. Search for new tracks in selectable directories to import new music. Create custom collecions to fill them with albums just by drag-&-drop. The Album Editor shows related information like the contained tracks and whether they are banned or not. In case the lookup didn't find covers, use the pre-configured Google Images link there and add images simply by copy-&-paste. You can even crop them. Manage additional images and maintain album and track attributes. Use freedb and several other lookup sources to get track titles, release dates, etc.

The lookup process is very flexible to assure that all your music gets imported correctly, regardless of what file or folder structure you might use. AlbumPlayer will never touch your files or re-structure them. You can specify four different lookup steps to decide what sources you want to use to get information from. freedb for the track titles, but Amazon for the cover? No problem - set up the process as you please. Calculating replay gain can be done automtically for new tracks.

Major Features:

1. Easily browse your music collection by surfing through the covers. Just select an album by clicking the cover, open the album booklet and select some tracks to play.
2. AlbumPlayer offers native ASIO support for audiophile listeners and reads WMA, MP3, OGG, FLAC, WAV, APE, WavPack, MusePack and the OptimFROG format.
3. Create custom collections of your albums and sort them by artist, genre, release date and many more criteria. Realtime filter included to access your music instantly.
4. Offers touchscreen layouts including bigger buttons, an integrated onscreen keyboard and touchscreen optimized behavior for your living room or your car.
5. Shuffle your playlists or your whole database and define a lot of filter parameters like rating, genre, style, tones, album collections and more to just hear your favourites.
6. Improve your collection by adding artist-related data and images. Use integrated artist-related links to AMG, last.fm, Wikipedia and other information resources.
7. Allow your guests to interact with the playlist but prevent them from messing around with your music collection or your PC with the password-protected Party Mode.
8. Scan your music to normalize the playback volume to an average level per track (or per album). Use the built-in equalizer to adjust frequency levels +/- 15 decibel.
9. Copy albums and playlist files from AlbumPlayer directly to any folder or to your mobile device simply by drag&drop, regardless of where your data is stored originally.
10. An MCE Remote Control Add- On is available. Cusomizable system-wide hotkeys allow it to use almost any remote control. Including optimized remote functions and layout.
11. Download MiniLyrics. Once installed, song lyrics can be shown embedded in the main AlbumPlayer view. MiniLyrics also supports auto-scrolling as the song plays along.
12. ALL future versions are for free! Once purchased you'll get an email whenever a new version comes out. No spam, no strings attached. Your privacy is holy to us.
13. Enables you to scrobble your playback history to last.fm, which is a free service for recommending new artists, that you propably like, as well as videos, events, etc.
14. Check out the fully functional free demo version, which is only limited by a maximum continues play time.

Enhancements: Total rebuild of user interface and many new functions added