MP3Toys

http://www.mp3toys.net

$19.95 USD, 28 day trial available

Overview

So, MP3Toys? I know what you’re likely thinking – I’ve never heard of it. I wouldn’t blame you for that in the least – I suspect not many people have. Just in case you’re also confused about what it is, it’s an audio player for Windows. The difference between MP3Toys and other players, like iTunes, Winamp, MediaMonkey, Songbird, Media Center, aTunes, etc is that it doesn’t divert into the realm of podcasts, video, downloadable music, online radio, and so on. It tries to do one thing and do it well – play your mp3 tracks and do it attractively. For those of you wondering, yes it also plays other formats:  from their website … it “Plays MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC and M4A files”.

If you do end up buying the full version, like in many shareware programs, you get all future updates for free, but you also get a full-fledged mp3 tag editor. Not a bad deal for $20.

Features

So what makes mp3toys so great? You’ve got to be wondering this. Why do I use it instead of the above-linked programs?? Well, I have used all of the above for a time and discounted each of them for various reasons, which I will very briefly outline below. I’m not trying to flame any of those programs – they’re all very good in their own ways, but they didn’t quite work for me.

What I was looking for specifically was this:

• a music player that was lightweight on resources
• had popup tray notifications
• connected to last.fm for artist info and/or lyrics sources for song lyrics
• easy to update album art
• intuitive and easy to use

That’s the basics of it. Why I didn’t stick with the other programs?

• iTunes – simply it is WAY too heavy on resources. 85 MB when running is completely unacceptable (imo). No artist info/lyrics. Have to connect to the Apple store to get album art??? (booooo)
• Songbird – still too unpolished, slow, and like iTunes, wayyy too heavy on resources. They’re getting there though. Album art seems to be an afterthought.
• Media Monkey – just too complicated for its own good. Feature overload.
• JR Media Center – Has a case of the crashies on occasioin – too many features I don’t need or want (videos/photos). No internet connectivity.
• WinAmp – too long since an update. Needs a complete overhaul, interface-wise. They’ve been kludging addons and features into it for ages now.
• aTunes – Good, and nearly there. A few more releases and I’ll check this out again. I’ve never been fond of Java-based programs.

MP3Toys pretty much fulfills all of my wants, in one neat little package. In addition, there’s a bunch of features that it adds that I didn’t even know I wanted:

• minimize to tray
• album art tray thumbnail
• tray icon playlist navigation (on right-click context menu)
• played albums and playlist history
• auto-updating ‘popular’ albums, based on # of plays

All these features are implemented well and are polished. On top of that, when it’s minimized to the tray, as you can see, it takes between 10 and 25 MBs of memory at any given time. Not bad.

Screenshots

Screenshots are really the best way to show off this program. What it does best is not just play music, but show off your music at the same time. Album art is integrated throughout the program, so that you’re not just browsing lists of music, but mostly your album covers. This is as slick and very effective way of navigating your collection.

This is the main interface of the program. I’ve got the settings configured such that the playlist window collapses when the screen is too small to handle it as I find when both are onscreen, it’s a bit too busy. So what are we looking at here… along the bottom is the album browser, currently showing albums alphabetically. You can browse by simply using your mousewheel over this section to peruse your collection. You can also filter your collection in a variety of ways, clicking on the filters above the album art. Hovering your mouse over any one of the thumbnails in the album browser shows 2 images overlaid – one to add that album to the current (topmost) playlist in the playlist history (on the right hand side) and a button that lets you view that albums tracklist, overlaid over the album art thumbnail.

Hover over the thumbnail for about a second, and it will show you the tracklist of that album next to the currently playing album (shown in the large album art on the right – currently, Tim Easton). This also lets you see the other albums that you have of that artist, in this case, Metric. This is a nice quick way to view and browse albums by a certain artist. Notice that some albums in the browser have different icons overlaid on them as well. A heart indicates a popular album that’s been played a lot (filterable by clicking ‘Popular’ above) and an exclamation point indicates a new album (filterable by ‘New’).

Now we’re playing a playlist. On either side of the main window, you can see the History – Albums played on the left and Playlists on the right. Clicking on any one of those will bump them to be the topmost – and current – album or playlist. When you’re playing a playlist, clicking on the ‘+’ on an album (displayed on hover) will add that album to the playlist. On the left side, I’ve clicked on the lyrics button. This overlays the lyrics on the album art. The small music note icons next to the song number in a playlist indicates if lyrics are available for that track.

I’ve now clicked on ‘Artist’. This pulls info from Last.FM and compiles it nicely, including links and a photo of the artist. Right-clicking anywhere in this pane lets me select ‘Show Artist Albums’, which will immediately bring up all albums in my collection from that artist. You can also click on ‘Similar: In Collection’ to quickly filter by similar artists in your collection. In addition, you can click on ‘Similar’ anytime a song is playing to immediately filter by this – you don’t need to do it within the artist pane.

Here’s MP3Toys in my task list, using up around 15MBs. This is very typical usage stats. Sometimes it goes up to around 20MB, but this isn’t typical.

Finally, we’ve got the tray icon. You can see that the icon itself is a thumbnail of the current album playing. You can also see the partially obscured notification window. It shows the song name, the artist, the album, and a thumbnail of the album art. The context menu is self-explanatory.

A very nice feature of this tray icon is that you can quickly pause or resume your music with a single left-click of it at any time.

Conclusion

MP3Toys is a fantastic example of a single developer making a great product. Since it’s been around for a while, it’s polished and intuitive. While not for everyone (no iTunes store, no podcast support, no CD burning until ver3, etc), it is a cheap, well-designed and incredibly stable audio player.

I consider this to be one of the best programs I’ve ever spent $20 on. I use it all day, every day, both at work and home. If you’re even intrigued a little bit, I strongly urge you to download the trial and check it out.

Rating: (9.5)

Please Note…

If you’re put off by the lack of burning support, simply export your playlist to .m3u (easily done via right-click context menu) and then use MP3 CD Doctor Lite (freeware, unaffiliated with MP3Toys) to burn it. Quick and easy.

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