15-Minute Reviews :: IconMP3 v1.0.0.3

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is IconMP3 version 1.0.0.3 by Zards Software – A system tray-based MP3 player.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“IconMP3 is a small mp3 player that minimizes to the system tray to save desk space. When minimized there is a right click menu with all the common player controls and also shows the song currently playing so there is no need to maximize the the player to control it.

IconMP3 supports the latest ID tags for mp3 songs. IconMp3 also supports play list creation and auto load of play lists.”

Quick Pros

• Interface relatively easy going
• Minimizes to tray
• Playback pretty good
• Low CPU usage

Quick Cons

• Right scrollbar on playlist occasionally does not work
• Songs do not progress through, even with repeat all or shuffle on
• Window not resizable – Can’t see longer track titles or artists
• No options to speak of
• Memory usage high

Expansion

While I mostly listen to Shoutcast stations, it might be nice to have a light application for some of my files from time to time. Upon launching the application for the first time, the application starts up directly in the system tray. You can add files to the playlist from the system tray and control almost all of the functionality from the system tray. To add directories, you still need to open the main window, which is very basic but easy to use. All of the functionality in this application works similarly to many other MP3 players (when it works). Playback is smooth as well, which is a good benefit.

It’s not all glitter though. I found that in the main window, the right scrollbar would not work at times, and then sometimes it would just come back to life on the third or fourth click for some reason. Also, I don’t know what the issue, but doesn’t seem to matter what shuffle or repeat settings you have it on, whatever song you choose stays playing until you choose the next one in the playlist manually or use the forward/back button. There are no options to speak of in this application either; No settings for what audio output it plays to – It plays to whatever device you have set as default on the system or otherwise. The window is also not resizable, preventing you from not seeing the entire title of a file; With that, the application also truncates the title as well for everywhere, so even when you mouseover the system tray it is shortened.

A final note; While this application is great for a system tray application, I find that the memory footprint is a little hefty. Likely related to .NET Framework; Upon first launch into the system tray, it sits a bit under 20MB usage. Once you open a few files however and start playback, the memory usage climbs to 33MB. This is over double of what my WinAMP installation runs at; It would be a good chunk of memory to chew off, especially with 512MB of RAM. On the positive side, the CPU usage is low – Runs under 1 percent CPU usage.

Final Verdict

While I was interested at first, when I came into this application and finding the issues. I was truly disappointed. For free, it is really not worth it for the quality (Especially with the issue of sticking on the songs). As for paying $29.95 for this title, even if all the issues were cleared, I still would have difficult time paying for a title when there are so many freeware and opensource titles out there like WinAMP. – WinAMP too can minimize to the System Tray too through the preferences and can be as small, or smaller than the footprint of this applications.

Posted by BladedThoth on Saturday, September 22, 2007