Terra Lycos Sonique 1.90
It's far from a full featured jukebox program, but Sonique's millions of users couldn't care less. They're too busy creating, exchanging, and experiencing the best skins and visualizations available. If eccentric interfaces and dazzling eye-candy is your idea of a good time, you'll want this free download to spice up your MP3, Windows Media, and WAV files.
It doesn't support CD burning. It can't connect to portable MP3 players. It can't even write audio files. It has no built-in Internet radio stations or digital-rights management, and can't automatically create playlists based on your search criteria. Feature-wise, Lycos Sonique 1.90 is a simple Windows-based audio player. So why are there five million copies in distribution with 10,000 new users every day? The answer is simple: This free audio player has the best skins and visualizations anywhere. If you like exotic interfaces and sweeping images that gyrate to the music, this one's for you.
Not that Sonique is a slouch as an audio player. Its proprietary AE 4.8 MPEG decoder is one of the best around, and the program supports a wide range of audio file formats, including MP3, MP2, WAV, OGG, MOD, XM, IT, S3M, CD audio, and the full range of Windows Media files. There's also a 20-band graphic equaliser with separate controls for balance, amplification, and pitch. The equaliser now works with all the supported audio types, including CDs. Recent updates have added support for DSP plug-ins and multiple monitors (so you can send a full-screen visualization to a separate display), as well as full-screen scaling for visualisations (switch from 2:1, 4:1, and 8:1 ratios using the Page Up and Page Down keys).
Built on top of this capable, although hardly outstanding, audio player, is an extensive plug-in architecture. Lycos freely distributes the software tools that tap into this architecture and make it easy to create highly original skins and breathtakingly stunning visualizations. In fact, there are so many plug-ins for Sonique that the company has instituted a ratings system so users can vote for their favorites. A top-ten list shows the current overall favorites, as well as the popular choices for each category. Skin categories include metallic, tech, organic, sci-fi, gothic, anime, theme and movies/TV. Visualisation plug-ins exhibit a similar diversity. You can choose exploding fountains of colour, spinning star gates, rippling eddies of fluid light, or shimmering geometric patterns.
There's even a friendly competition between the visualization developers to see who can top the others. And you can usually see a steady improvement from month to month as they build on each other's accomplishments. Visualization plug-ins are so important to Sonique's audience, in fact, that many skin designs have change buttons for the visualizations that are larger than the change buttons for the audio tracks.
If dazzling eye-candy and eccentric interface designs aren't your cup of tea, you would probably be better off with one of the other free jukebox programs, such as the free versions of MusicMatch Jukebox or RealJukebox 2. But if you would like to add some spice to your desktop, you owe it to yourself to try Sonique. It will add an element of adventure to every audio file you play.
Company:LYCOS
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