Anything but Winamp...

This is the first time for us to write a review-cum-comparison. Our victims now are some media players and we are talking about emphasizing on the audio capability of those software. We decided to write this article after all of us here grown tired of Winamp. Initially we would include Yahoo Musicmatch and RealPlayer too but in the final editing those two were dropped because the former was way too basic while the latter was way too restrictive in it's freeware edition (and we don't bother to throw in JRiver MediaCenter as that software is a total piece of shareware). Since most of us here can be considered as audiophiles then it can't be helped that we will list out the players from the best to the worst. However, please bear in mind that we are a different breed of audiophiles since we believe in personalization of music, which means we heavily emphasize on sound enhancements.

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1. COWON JetAudio

At first we are a bit reluctant to write a review about this player since it is a 'payware' (OK, it's a shareware). However, after considering that the free version isn't too restrictive then we finally give this a pass, and on top of that it is clearly the winner for the various sound enhancement features that comes with it. The sound enhancement features are so rich that you almost won't need any third party DSP plug-in even with some of them are disabled in the free version. Besides it's not that JetAudio really support third party plug-ins anyway. Luckily one of us are generous enough to sponsor us the full version so we get to listen to the music with all sound enhancement features are enabled in their full glory. Not only that, we pretty much like its volume leveling feature that makes 'inconsistent' music (music that suddenly becomes loud all of a sudden in the middle of listening) become more gentle to the ears. The player seems to come with some sort of a good "bass compression" too that we rarely hear sound distortions on our speakers/headphones, as if it knows what speakers we're using and will automatically 'compress' the bass down a bit to make any resulting distortion due to heavy bass become less noticeable. The built-in 20-band equalizer is also very much welcomed, since so far we only see only iTunes and Foobar2000 that comes with 20-band equalizer like this. To top it off, we managed to tune the low frequencies to the max and we hardly can hear any noticeable distortions, thanks to the "bass compression" feature we mentioned earlier. However, on the negative side, it comes with very limited presets but luckily users can create and save their own presets or even download them from the internet if they're too lazy to create them on their own. JetAudio has become so mature since now that it features a nice media library, although the drag&drop feature may not compatible with some other players (i.e. dragging&dropping from/to other player 's library). Some people (like one or two of us here) however don't like the 'seemingly cluttered' interface. Yes, they might be a bit cluttered upon the first run but those (like the so-called 'remote control' window) can be turned off. One thing that we really like with JetAudio is, ever since the oldest version of JetAudio we could remember, it has been supporting video playback when Winamp was not, and it plays quite a number or video formats too. Today it is also one of a very few audio player out there that supports FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Format) which is what an audiophile would want. We also like the alarm and timer function though it would be better if it comes with the sleep mode playing like the one found in MediaMonkey. With all this features, JetAudio basily beats all the media players in this comparison with a large margin.

2. Windows Media Player 11

Windows Media Player is a default media player in Windows and it has been available since the advent of Windows 95, although its functions was very much limited back then. The first major revamp of WMP was done with the birth of the 'failed' Windows ME. Yes, the OS itself may be a failure of an OS but Microsoft managed to steal some attention with the Windows Media Player 7. For us, it was one of the first media players that comes with a good media library management available for Windows operating systems. Not even Winamp has the media library management on that time, and iTunes for Windows was not around yet. On the sound enhancement department, as an addition to its limited 10-band equalizer, it has the SRS WOW effects in the form of SRS TruBass and SRS TruSurround. Although WMP supports third party plug-ins, we don't bother to get those as we already satisfied with the SRS WOW effects. The only thing we don't like about WMP's sound enhancements is, not only you can't save your own equalizer setting, they tend to give extreme boost to your music even with only a very little tweak, to the extent that that it would sound like your speakers are going to get destroyed. Therefore during the test session we disabled the equalizer completely and only relying on the WOW SRS effects as well as the qualization/sound enhancement settings that comes with our soundcard. Anyways WMP remains one of Microsoft's strong point although it's a bit of surprised to us that unlike Internet Explorer (which is the dominant in web browser market), WMP failed to be the dominant in media player market despite it is shipped with Windows, just like IE. Well, we are kind of understand why it is like that (WMP's supported file format is kind of limited and we believe it is one of the reasons).

3. Foobar2000


Foobar2000 is one of a few players out there that is able to deliver great sound quality. It's interface is simple as if it was made merely using the default Visual Basic UI. However don't let that fools you as looks can be deceiving. Right upon installation, the first thing we would like to find is the sound enhancement and the player did not disappoint us with the 20-band equalizer is built in. We like the snap-to sliders on the equalizer, so you will know definitely where you are when tweaking the frequencies. For us this is much better than just a simple indicator found in most players. As this player also supports third party plug-ins, there are plenty of them on the net, and most of them are on the official Foobar2k website too. It supports FLAC format (for those who happen to be the real audiophile) and some other rare audio formats not usually found in other players. This is one of the welcomed features as we here like to try out various formats in search for the ultimate sound settings. However we can't really tolerate on how this player handles ID3 tags. Upon loading the files to the playlist/library, it does not automatically reads them until you play those files. Even so, it still behave erratically even after it plays those files, as occasionally we found it displays the file name instead of the 'artist - song' name like most other players do. And we really hope it would be able to store individual EQ settings for each songs like in iTunes but it does not. Besides, the info columns is not movable but only resizeable, unlike those in ITunes too. At the time of writing, the player just reached the version 1.0 after years in development, as if it was stalled. Honestly last year we had a thought that it would not reach version 1.0 for at least another 2 years. Well, it would have been faster if it was made open source but too bad only the SDK components are available as open source under the BDS license. We however really like the skinning ability of the player. However it does not make it as "the Firefox of audio players" since it is CLOSED SOURCE. If you are talking about "the Firefox of audio players" then we would recommend Songbird, which is not only made with Firefox core, but also open source and highly customizable.

4. iTunes


iTunes is one of the easiest media players we've witnessed so far, though not the one to die for. Although the functions and supported formats are way behind other players, its ease-of-use would easily make one forget about its limitation. So what makes us so attached to this player? It is the equalizer which is to us is the most flexible of all players in the world. It allows user to 'tie' a song with any of the equalizer settings, which means you can have your music with their own equalizer setting. Well, we know that different music have different highs and lows that we believe it would need different equalization. Not only equalization, iTunes allows you to set the volume for each music as an addition to the built-in automatic volume leveling. However, the major setback unforgivable for iTunes is it doesn't support any third party plug-ins, so you can't extend the sound enhancement capability. Drag-to-select also don't work in the media listing so you'd have to resort to either pressing "Ctrl+A" or use the "Edit>Select all" menu. We also really despise the fact that playlist sharing between iTunes and other players is (almost) a no-no because the playlist created in iTunes can only be exported as an XML file. It is fine if other players can import this XML file into a playlist but not many players out there supports XML and we wonder ourself why the heck Apple didn't choose to support proven-to-be-more-popular playlist formats like M3U or PLS? We may be lucky that Apply didn't opt for a proprietary playlist format but at least they should join the public domain rather than forcing people to see things in their way. And we found it is strange for iTunes didn't comes with support for Quicktime video and it's pretty sick for it to support only MP4 as the only playable video format. For us, if a player comes with very limited feature like this it should at least support third party plug-ins to extend its features. With this considerations, iTunes didn't manage to be in our first 3 winners list.

5. BSPlayer


BSPlayer is the only 'Winamp-like' player here than the rest of other players in this comparison. What we mean by 'Winamp-like' here is the static-window interface (which is' non-maximize-able'). However, unlike Winamp's more proper media library, BSPlayer's library is quite limited in manageability. A new user wouldn't know it has a media library function unless s/he is brave and curious enough to delve into the context menus since the availability of the media library is not really obvious to most first timers.Other than the wide range of media supported out-of-the-box, we found the only strong point of BSPlayer is the 'unlimited' band equalizer. The only 'limit' to this EQ settings is your PC processing power, your speakers capability (of handling certain range of frequencies) and your hearing (take note that human hearing can only detect sound frequency between 20Hz to 20kHz so be sure your setting is not out of this range) and also your money. Yes, this 'unlimited' EQ only comes in the PRO version of the player (as an unlockable feature). With the free version, you will have to bear with the generic 10-band equalizer (just like Winamp). However, even with only 10-band equalizer, we'll have to warn you that the equalizer works like the one in Windows Media Player. What we mean here is even with a slight tweak they will tend to cause some distortion to your speaker, which is a turn-off factor if you are a bass-head person who likes to play your music loud. Not only that, each frequency band of the equalizer has a +/- 20dB increment but without snap-to sliders, it's hard to tune the increment to the number you want. In the test, we had a hard time to add exactly 10dB to the 60Hz low frequency band (to add the bass effect) and ended up at either 9.8dB or 10.2dB, until at the end we have no choice but to give up. Because the equalizer is too sensitive, even 0.1dB increment is noticeable on our speakers. Although we like the 'unlimited' EQ, we didn't like the fact that the saved settings will be rendered useless whenever you changed add/remove the band(s), and they will only work only if you reverts back to the exact band numbers. What we meant here is if you create a 20-band EQ ranging from say 30Hz-19kHz and saved the settings then the settings will only work with the same 20-band EQ with the same frequency range (and the same frequency divisions too). Truly inconvenient for sound enhancement freaks like us.

6. Beoplayer


Beoplayer is one 'weird' player that will turn any Windows PC to mimic a Bang & Olufsen audio product. The software though gives us either-love-or-hate impression, where we found it friendly and not friendly at the same time. Like all B&O product ranges, Beoplayer also tried to give the 'ease-of-use' feeling in our heart. Generally, audiophile refers to those who prefer to listen to music the way they are intended, but we here are different kind of audiophile, as we intend to listen to music the way we preferred (that's what we call "freedom of music listening"), thus we highly revere, welcome and support any kind of sound enhancement feature in any media player. The people at Bang & Olufsen however believe it the other way, where they think a media player (both hardware and software) must be 'honest', which means the music must be played as it was recorded. That is why you won't find any sound enhancement feature in the player, let alone graphic equalizer. So if you'd ever choose this software to be your player then you'd have to rely on your soundcard's sound enhancement feature (most higher-end soundcards comes with this). Beoplayer is meant to be a truly audio-only player so don't expect it to support any other format (READ: VIDEO) in the near future, although we think that is the department that Bang & Olufsen should change.

7. MediaMonkey


MediaMonkey is another not-so-restrictive shareware that made its way into this comparison. Function wise, this player almost matching COWON JetAudio. However, with the 10-band equalizer as the only sound enhancement feature that comes with the default package, we have to place this player several stairs below JetAudio. Thank goodness it supports third party plug-ins to extend the sound enhancement capability and we managed to get some too that works pretty good. We really like the sleep function which works similar to JetAudio's timer function but slightly better with an option to fade out the volume as the timer is reaching its end. There are plenty of other options available for the sleep function too, such as to shut down the PC or just closing the player. Our issue with this player is the drag&drop file management may or may not work with other players, and you might need to perform a trial-error test to see which other players would work with it. Other than that MediaMonkey is just a plain media player but still to us it is a media player worth an attention.

8. Winamp


Winamp is a media player that "anybody who know how to use computer knows" that we think we should not waste our time introducing this. We can say it is one of the pioneer of the mp3 fever back in the 90's and managed to survive until today. With a large user base it is by no doubt the king of media player. However to tell you the truth we never like Winamp except that we are thankful to it for being responsible of infecting every single of us here with the so-called mp3 fever. Well, for us the floating windows that made up the player is a bit cluttered to us and the player doesn't do much until the arrival of Winamp 5. Our 'hatred' towards Winamp 5 become more apparent with it becomes s shareware. To make it worse, the locked feature in the free version (like the fast CD burning/ripping) are offered many other free players, which makes us think Nullsoft (the developer) are making money from it in a nonsense way. Enough about that lets go to the sound enhancement feature. Well, like most players out there, it only comes with the basic 10-band equalizer. Luckily there are tons of plug-ins available on the official website to extend this (and many of them are free too) but too much of them will confuse most users, especially with Winamp has so many users out there. The media library is quite confusing to get used to but it is a welcomed feature considering many people is using Winamp for playing various types of media. Supported media format is good and it can handle exotic media format with a simple plug-in installation, provided that you have necessary CODECs installed in your system of course. The skinning feature also has switched from static to dynamic skinning since Winamp 3, and many of them are available on the official website too. However, those stuff still don't turn our 'hatred' to love. In fact we feel the plain boxy interface of Foobar200 looks better than the Classic Winamp skin. Heh! Perhaps it'd be better if Winamp can be 'de-skinned' LOL

*All software are tested using the Creative Cambridge SoundWorks PS2000 digital speaker with Realtek HD Audio on-board sound with digital (optical & coaxial) output.

Mozilla Songbird

Songbird is a free and open source audio player for all major operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It is part of the Mozilla Foundation project and the current stable release is version 1.2.

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We finally urged to put Songbird under a series of tests for a review after informed that the latest version comes with equalizer, a sound enhancement we have been longing for in Songbird. The unavailability of the equalizer all this time is what makes most of us here reluctant to use itor even try it because we here love to manipulate sounds to suit our personal preferences.

Songbird was intended to be the world's first 'web player' which was said to be able to play web media seamlessly. This was made possible thanks for the utilization of Mozilla's XULRunner Platform which also contributes to the multi-platform nature of this software.

Songbird has been around since February 2006 and has been steadily developed and improved by the developer and contributor community. Many features has been added since then and the most recent and noticeable feature would be the inclusion of 10-band equalizer. This equalizer is not much but it is what user has been nagging and anticipating for more than 2 years. It is a pity that a sound enhancement feature like this was missing and been underestimated (ignored/overseen/undermined) by the developer when they first release the software.

Songbird, unlike its web browser siblings (Firefox, Flock, etc.) however fails to gain its own identity. From the beginning, it tries to mimic both Firefox and iTunes, and the UI and even the default 'Feathers' (skin) is very much resembles iTunes in most aspects (around 90% if we must say). This is probably because "Songbird promises to be the Firefox of media players" (Aaron Boodman, Greasemonkey) as well as being as powerful as iTunes. Nice try they had there and they succeed to certain extent while most of the time they failed hard.

We must say Songbird tries to be as powerful as both Firefox and iTunes combined although in reality it is not as powerful as either of the software alone. To be another Firefox, it disables many of Firefox's capabilities despite adopting its entire codebase. To make it worse, the developer has announced that the browser extension is just a secondary (minor) feature and they won't take care much about it. What a waste when they can just make it to be a browser with media playing capability. On the other hand, to be an iTunes, Songbird did not include great features like the individual EQ settings for songs and there is not even a CD ripping/writing present. To make it worse, although there's an add-on for EQ presets (presets are unavailable by default) there is still no way to create your own. Luckily it supports more audio format than iTunes, particularly open source format like OGG and FLAC. Not to mention the skinning (Feathers) that makes iTunes looks lame.

We have a suggestion to Songbird developers. Instead of mimicking only Firefox and iTunes, they might have to look forward on Windows Media Player too. We know Songbird has built-in volume gain feature but it is not as powerful as WMP's "Quiet Mode" (sound limiter/filter). Perhaps they may try mimicking WMP in the next release? Even as a plain audio player, Songbird still does not match Winamp so as long as we still see both iTunes and Winamp as our favorite, Songbird won't last long in our software installation list. Thanks for trying Songbird.

We have tried and tested the software and it fails to replace iTunes, WMP and Winamp in our heart. We can't accept an excuse like "this is due to its immaturity" for this software has been in development for 2 and a half year already. Honestly, we found that Songbird is not as heavily polished as Firefox (talking about slower development here). We hope this will change soon because we here are long time (die hard) open source software supporter and we are looking forward towards the next release. We would like to have an open source media player that can rival head to head with those old timer.

Download Songbird for free here:
http://getsongbird.com/

SUPER Video Encoder

SUPER is a video encoder software for Windows. It is developed and distributed for free by eRightsoft.

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SUPER is not an encoder by itself. It is just a GUI front-end for real encoders beneath. These encoders include FFmpeg, MEncoder, MPlayer, x264, ffmpeg2theora, musepack, Monkey's Audio, True Audio, WavPack, libavcodec, and the Theora/Vorbis RealProducer plugIn projects. SUPER is meant to replace the command line interface which are used by these back-end encoders.

While the encoders used underneath this software are mostly open-source, the case is different with SUPER where it is closed-source and solely developed by eRightsoft. Despite this, SUPER keeps up its reputation of having rapid development with almost having one new version each month. This development rate is usually only seen on open-source software.

Being a video encoder (it also features audio encoder as well), minimum system requirement by this software is quite high, although it may not as high as most of other commercially available encoders. For instance, it requires a CPU of minimum 1.8GHz clockspeed, 512MB RAM with 176MB free system memory and 20GB of free space in the partition where the OS is installed. This however should have been expected and should not be much an issue anymore in today's computing. In fact, this requirement is already low enough to make professional video encoding viable. Anyways, during the test on an old Pentium 3 1GHz machine (with 512MB SDRAM), the software face no problem at all encoding a full length movie, albeit took a few hours longer compared to on newer Intel Core 2 Duo machine.

eRightsoft so very confident of their software and claims that "SUPER does for free what other encoders can't do for money". This is quite true considering how many formats the software supported and the availability of presets for mobile device such as SONY PSP, Nintendo-DS, iPod and NOKIA phones adds more value to this software.

After all this, SUPER also comes with some flaws. It lacks of controls that might have been posible by using the command line interface. For example, 'intercoding/transcoding' (encoding from another encoded format) an anime movie with Matroska video format (*.mkv) to an *.avi (with x.264 video codec) are missing the option to resize the font for the subtitles (since subtitle comes as a separate layer in MKV), rendering the resulting movie with the default subtitle size covering more than 10% of the scree, which is pretty much annoying to watch. This option should have been made available in the first place for most MKV videos might have more than 1 embedded subtitles/audio.

Overall, SUPER is good for home use, and might be great to be used side by side with other free video encoding/editing software like VirtualDub and tMPEGenc.

Get SUPER for free here:
http://www.erightsoft.com/S6Kg1.html

Apple iTunes

Apple iTunes is a free media player for both Windows and Mac OS X. It was a media library made by Apple for Mac OS X only until a Windows-ported was launched since version 4. It was a hit since then.

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Initially as a proprietary digital music organizer for Mac computer and iPod, iTunes is now regarded as one of the best media player of all time. Despite the criticism it received for not having a Windows version from the beginning, today many Windows user who have tried iTunes are satisfied and decided to continue using it. It has evolved much, with the current version (ver. 8.2 at the time of writing) offers several features like movie player (though limited to mp4 video only, not even the Quicktime mov files), podcasting and many more.

As its name bears, the iTunes player is associated with the iTunes online music store in many ways. Registered user can purchase songs (DRM-enabled) via this service for less than US$1 per song, though user would need a credit card to make a purchase. This is quite cheap for most users, and also comparable to most of other online music stores.

On the surface, iTunes is very simple to use, especially the Library that is much more easier to manage than those found in Winamp or Windows Media Player. Just with a few clicks and drags&drops, you'll be just a step away to play your selection of songs a.k.a. playlist. Media library can't be easier than this.

iTunes also features built-in CD ripping, allowing you to convert CD musics to AAC (DRM or non-DRM), mp3 or Apple Lossless. It also plays non-DRM Windows Media Audio (WMA) files but it could have been better if it allows conversion to other format like FLAC. iTunes also supports 3rd party plugins but so far there is no plugin to extend the capabilities of handling the non-default audio format.

Even iTunes comes with its flaws too. It is BLOATED with many most likely unnecessary stuff like the Bonjour service and less than useful Quicktime player, though Bonjour may be uninstalled later. Quicktime is however compulsory or iTunes won't work, which may make people doubt is iTunes by itself really a media player when it has to rely on the presence of Quicktime where most of the time Quicktime is only used to watch downloaded movie trailers? There are ways to use iTunes without Quicktime but this is another story.

Users also have been nagging for a long time about iTunes support for portable media player other than iPod but Apple is just too stubborn (or stupid) to listen to these complaints. Thank God there is a software named Bad Apple that allows iTunes to work seamlessly with most major portable media player like Creative Zen and Microsoft Zune although there is no guarantee that the process would be fuss-free. Overall, iTunes still do a good job especially allowing each song to have its own equalizer setting (because different song need different equalization).

Get iTunes for free here:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

Beo Player

Beo Player is a free mp3 player made by Bang & Olufsen for Windows. The program is currently in its 5th version, now with support for picture management since the 4th version. There is no video playing capability yet, and it is likely that Bang & Olufsen won’t include video playing at least in the near future.

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Despite in version 5, the program has not much changes since the very first one. It still retaining the same look, and as expected, there is no EQ control at all. This may be surprising for many but Bang & Olufsen claimed that this player produce “honest sound” so there is no need for an equalizer. This might be true considering that Bang & Olufsen is well known for producing premium-priced audio-video products as well as being one of the oldest consumer electronic company that still survive since the World War II (they made the communication radio for the war veterans on that time!). Perhaps even their physical products range don’t have EQ as well? Who knows, unless we buy them and have a try ourselves, but that is not likely since the price to pay may cost us both of our arms and legs. Even their 256 MB mp3 player costs more than the latest generation of iPod (which have tens more of gigabytes for your music at the same price)! Luxury, quality or stupidity? Anyways, just live it at that.

As mentioned earlier, Bang & Olufsen claimed the player to have the most honest sound (playing the music as it was recorded). Well, at least it is true at both theoretical and software level but not in practice. In the test, Beo Player was compared head to head with other 2 much-loved players, namely iTunes and Winamp. Since Beo Player does not come with any EQ, so to make the competition fair, both Winamp and iTunes EQ are disabled. During the test, there was no noticeable difference or perhaps no difference at all between those players when playing music. Therefore, Bang & Olufsen’s claim of the so-called “honest sound” is not necessarily true. If it is just about being minimalized player, even low profile players like Freeamp and Liteamp do much better, and both of the latter even comes with EQ. Bang & Olufsen seems to have bad karma with EQ and mysteriously keeps avoiding to incorporate that feature in their products range. Music may need to be listened as it was intended but it is a fact that different people have different hearings. Therefore some people may need enhanced bass or treble in order to enjoy the music. iTunes is better in providing this, by allowing different songs to have different EQ settings; perhaps because different music needs different adjustment? Winamp also can be enhanced to do the similar thing by using the RTEQ plugin (Realtime Equalizer), a kind of dynamic equalizer that adjusted automatically based on initial user settings. The reason of this one is, on the hand might be “because different parts of music need different sets of equalizer settings”? Again, just leave it at that for now.

Beo Player also is not really having small footprint. It occupies almost 80 MB of disk space upon installation and another 8 MB of system memory when running idle. Not to mention the 30 MB requirement of system resources when playing the music. 8 MB is maybe small enough for a media player but to run on, Beo Player needs a background program called Beotray that occupies 5 MB of system memory. That is ridiculous for being a background program, especially for something that only appear on system tray and only have the ‘Exit’ command. It should have occupied smaller resource or at least do more things than just closing the program.

The interface is prretty simple but may be confusing and not straight forward for first timer. Unlike any other existing media player out there, it has no application window at all. All there are only vertical autohiding player bar on the righthand side of the screen and the autohiding library bar on the other. The info and scan ‘window’ only appear between these bars, covering the entire screen when you click on the assosicated buttons. The available buttons are the resemblance of those found on BeoSound 2000 (mp3 player) and Beo remote control. You might not have the slightest idea to know what this and that button do unless you are ready to experimenting with them, and there is no tooltip to guide you. Luckily, just like the buttons on iPod, there are very few of them on Beo Player and you’ll master them in no time. There’s also a cool-looking and extensive help file should you need assistance, and the guide is also available in several European languages as well, if English is not for you (not surprising as Bang & Olufsen is based in Germany after all).

On functionality, the player also features speedy CD ripping, one of the feature should hae been found in any media player these days, although Winamp still shamefully offer restrictive function for that (the full speed ripping is locked until you purchase it! Damn!). Media is added to the library by scanning the hard drive and there is no way to selectively scan only certain folders so you will have to wait longer if you have your music scattered in your local disk. Songs are divided by Playlists, Albums, Genres, Artists, Folders and Titles. The library looks pleasing too, as if it is an AJAX website. It also features album art display, if you have any (you should have, if your mp3s are original!).

The most annying part of this player is the software keeps bugging you to register before you could run it, although this can be skipped by simply canceling the process. This is weird for a free software to do, and Bang & Olufsen should know there are many people who choose to stay completely in privacy by refusing to register any software at all. If you are lucky, you’ll see the window with the checkbox “Stop reminding me” after several times (usually when it detected active internet connection). Choose it and the bugging registration window will gone and you can continue using the software. However, some people may not lucky enough where the player refuses to run. This usually occur you refuse to register when the internet connection is present. In this case, those who are on older Windows will be out of luck but for Windows XP and Vista user, if you still despereately need to run this software, you can just create another user account and use it there (regardless the privileges).

Overall, this player may get 2.5 points out of 10 and is not really recommended for those who used to EQ-enhanced music.

Get Beo Player here:
https://www.bang-olufsen.com/beoplayer/software-downloads