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Today I’ve come across an extraordinary capable Audio Player for Windows. Apollo is a great general purpose audio player. It has outstanding MP3 decoding quality, powerful continuous playback support and advanced playlist capabilities. I’ve compared the audio quality of Apollo with Winamp and the difference is quite noticeable in my opinion. Apollo offers up a much fuller sound and richness to the quality of my MP3’s. Enough to convince me to switch.
Another great bonus, and the clincher for me switching, is that you don’t have to give up your Winamp plug-ins, Apollo supports WinAmp’s (2.x or 5.x) visualization, digital signal processing (DSP) and general purpose plug-ins! I’ve even managed to get the Winamp Listen-To plug-in to run with Apollo.
(To do this simply rename a blank text file to “winamp.exe” and place into “C:/Program Files/Apollo/”, this tricks Listen-to’s installer into recognizing the directory. Unfortunately Listen-to uses the folder “Plugins” instead of Apollo’s “Plug-Ins” as the default directory, so you will have to move the contents into the correct directory for Apollo to find them.)So whats the downside? Well the only thing lacking is the fancy skins. I personally prefer audio quality and low resource usage over a pretty interface. But, if image is everything to you, this player isn’t for you. But remember, as the company states: “Sound quality is not skinnable”
I could live without the fancy skins, but it’s hard to understand interface is a bit to ask for. Also it doesn’t have a feature to remove it from usage in the task bar, and I find that some what annoying, since both WMP, and WinAmp have it. In the end, because of this, I think I’m going to stick with WA.
I decided to switch, I’ve only listened to a few songs in it so far, but the sound quality in general seems to be much better then any other program I’ve tried. It would have made things easier for me when I installed the Listen-To plug-in if I had actually read shifters post past the first paragraph when I clicked the link to go to the site. But I ended up doing it exactly the way he said.
I normally keep my media player minimzed anyway except for my controls built into the shell to change track/show track name, which work flawlessly with Apollo, even seem to work better then they did with winamp (which they were made for).
As far as removing it from the task bar, there is an option to send to system tray when minimized..but I see the drawback where you actaully have to minimize it.
Overall I found the playlist much more appealing, my albums are sorted into folders, so when I loaded them, it made the list as subfolders, so you can see each album seperatly. Plus when you export it to HTML, it looks very nice, nicely sorted with plenty of information.
Overall I give apollo a thumbs up.
OK, I take back my approval on this. I have found that Apollo loads your playlist into memory… Which is very bad for me. It uses about 78,000 K of memory usage when running with my playlist of approximatly 3000 tracks. It also takes about a minute of the computer freezing for Apollo to load, because it stresses the computer so much to load in the tracks into memory. It works great just for playing, but Having a large playlist is horrible. I’ll add an update to this if I find something to fix it.
Hmm, I didn’t notice the memory issue before. That is a downer, expecially for slower systems. There must be a better way to organize your playlist without loading them into memory. I’m going to look through the WinAmp plugins for a Playlist organizer that might work with Apollo.
Detn8r, I’m a little unclear on what the “feature to remove it from usage in the task bar” is. Do you mean the ability to exit the program using only the taskbar?
Thanks for checkin this app out guys, as I said, I only ran across it today and it seemed quite good. There are a few more downfalls now, but I think I’m still going to stick with it. Anyone else tried Apollo?
http://detn8r.pluslite.com/pictures/task.jpg
It has a space in the task bar. Both winamp, and media player don’t .. (you may argue about media player, but it has the features to switch, play, pause, stop etc .. while the way it is. This is obvisiously easier than opening the app. and doing it. )
OK, I think I understand. You prefer to have the playback controls on your taskbar, without opening the application?
Apollo does offer a fairly compact mini-window that you can place anywhere:
http://www.shiftthis.net/images/screenies/apollo.gif
If you throw Apollo into your Startup directory, its almost the same thing. Or am I way off base?I wanted it removed from the taskbar, and moved into the icon tray. But I just found it. The last arrow on the right does it. I think me, and my small playlist will keep it around for a bit. 😉
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Hmm… also MsgPlus’ (!WAT) feature seems to work with it too..
Oh, I gotcha now. Yup last arrow minimizes to tray, and there is also an option in the options area to always have it minimize to tray/notification area, it’s in the Appearance tab I believe. Another nice thing is that if you use the mini window, it removes the taskbar block as well.
I’m now trying a Winamp plug-in called Album List that seems to help keep your albums in view and playable, without loading everything into memory. It’s a little buggy – the mouse pointer seems to turn invisible in it, but otherwise I like the way it works. (Album List 2 does not seem to work at all though)
Here’s the description:Quote:quote:Cool plug-in that allows you to play albums as you would a single track… gives you the total time readout as well. Skinnable window keeps things spiffy and visually consistent. When you play an album track in the Album List window, the tracks all appear in theWinampApollo Play List window…so you are still able to browse by track. Solid plug-in.Try that sound quality on for size. 😀 Not only that, it’s a free program that rips in mp3, aac, wav, and aiff.
Ok, you’ve just forced my dl and try iTunes. I am generally impressed with it. It does have a great sound output quality and I can’t hear any dicernable difference between Apollo and iTunes. I’d expect no less from Apple, they generally make top quality in everything they do. I like iTunes as a whole and its a very formidable audio player. It does use up a fair chunk of memory to run, but at least it doesn’t load the playlist into memory as Apollo does.
I don’t like to use my audio players for my CD burning. I have burning software and it works fine. And as far as ripping goes, almost all players have a plug-in available for converting CD’s to mp3/wav and there are dedicated apps that generally give you better options and quality. These features will never sway me over to a new player anyway. It also has the problem Detn8r outlined above, it never leaves the taskbar. It has a system tray icon, but whats the point if its always on the taskbar anyway?
iTunes is a beautiful player with alot of cool features, but the bottom line is it just doesn’t streamline with my needs. I really do like the look though.
I tried iTunes when it first came out, it seems no real difference to winamp. I used it for awhile, mostly because it has the smart playlists… But Winamp 5 now includes everything that I liked from iTunes.
I remember I got iTunes to leave the taskbar somehow, I can’t remember off hand how to do it, and I’m not gonna go reinstall it just to figure it out.So for now, its back to Winamp I go… I guess you still can’t beat it.
Ok, after using Apollo for about a week, I’ve gone back to Winamp. Apollo does decode audio quite well for enhanced playback on your soundcard, but its lack of playlist features and memory problems have forced me to reconsider its usefullness. So I’ve returned to Winamp 5, and Sathallrin is correct, you just can’t beat it. I’m still a fan of Apollo, and I hope it continues to develop, but for now I don’t think its quite ready for the masses.
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