Windows 8 Music Player With Minimalist Interface: Simple Music Player
Simple Music Player is a free Music player application for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 devices that easily plays the most common audio format files like .ogg, .mp3, .wav, .wma, and others. The app is aptly titled as Simple Music Player, because it has a very minimalistic interface and looks extremely simple to operate. All you have to do is to add a folder(s) to the app via the Manage Library button in the control bar at the bottom, and you can start playing songs back to back through the list at the right side of the screen. The songs can be sorted according to folder, genre, or playlist. The playback controls are aptly positioned in the center of the screen, and they are big enough for easy click-ability for users on touch screen devices.
Simple Music Player is a one of a kind app that is incredibly minimalistic, and can work as a handy tool for playing back your media files; because once you have added a music folder to its library, the music files will show up almost instantaneously upon the app launch. This is due to the fact that the music player caches these music files so that they appear instantly on app launch and can be played back almost instantly when they are clicked. Simple Music Player can be downloaded for free from the Windows App Store.
Features of Simple Music Player…
Right from the moment you install and launch the Simple Music Player app on your Windows 8 device, you will be blown away by how easy and intuitive the app’s interface actually is. When you launch the app, you will be shown an interface which somewhat resembles the below screenshot. In the below screenshot, you can also see the control bars opened up from the top and bottom of the screen, providing you with various options. Both the control bars fly in to the screen when you right click on empty area of the screen.
In the above screen, you can see that I have clicked on the Manage Library button in the bottom control bar, which has presented me with two options, namely Add Folder and Remove Folder. As we haven’t added any folder yet and don’t have any music files opened up, let’s quickly go ahead and click on the Add Folder button and choose a folder on our drive which contains music files!
Once you have navigated to the folder containing music files, click on the Add this folder to Music button at the bottom right screen corner. Soon enough, you will be able to see that your music tracks have been added to the library, and now you can finally blast out some great music and experience eargasms!
Playing music is easy, just click on any track inside the list displayed towards the right side of the screen, and the music playback should start up right away! At the top of the list where the music tracks are displayed, you will be able to see a small search bar that aids you in searching through your list of music for a particular track, and this comes handy when your list of music tracks is pretty large.
The playback controls are present in the center of the screen, and they are the standard deal. The only thing missing here is the onscreen volume slider to control the volume, but you can always use your hardware volume controls to accomplish the same. Moving on to the control bars at the top, they allow you to view your music according to various categories like genre, folders, or even sort out your music via playlists! As the other options are pretty much self explanatory to say the least, let’s read more about how the playlists are created in this app.
Fire up the control bar, and click on Playlists button in the control bar at the top. This button is nestled comfortably in the right side of the top control bar. Upon doing so, you will be presented with the playlist screen, where your created playlists will be displayed towards the left side of the screen, and the added tracks will be presented towards the right.
To create a new playlist, simply click on the button next to the trash-can button at the bottom of the pane on the left. Now, you can add a name for your playlist, and press enter to save that name. You can add tracks to your playlist by clicking on the button next to the trash-can button. You will then be able to choose the tracks that you wish to add to the playlist. Once done, simply click on the Save button, and your playlist will be saved. You can only pick music tracks from the songs in the folders that you have added to the library of app. Multi selection of songs is also possible while adding songs to the playlist. The trash-can button on both the left and right panes performs the function of deletion, the former allowing for deletion of complete playlists and the latter allowing for deletion of selected songs (you can select playlists or songs by right clicking them).
Oh, and before I forget to mention this, let me quickly give you a happy news – the app supports snapped view, and you can also run it in background – it still works flawlessly!
This pretty much concludes all that you need to know to get started with using the Simple Music Player app for Windows 8/8.1 devices. I do hope that you will have a lot of fun using this app on your device!
You can also feel free to check out JetAudio Music Player, which performs the same function on your Windows 8/8.1 device.
My take on this app…
Simple Music Player is a great music player app for all devices running Windows 8 or Windows 8.1, and the best part about this app is that it’s free, runs in snapped mode, and even works flawlessly while running in the background! I absolutely love the simplicity of the app, and there are absolutely no gimmicks here – just plain simple interface with powerful music playback functionality. Moreover, the support for multiple music formats like .mp3, .ogg, .wmv, .wma etc. are a big dollop of icing on the cake!
I rate this app a phenomenal 4.5 out of 5.
Get Simple Music Player.