Ultra Player hmmmm? Well it looks nice, looks like it has features...

First Impressions:
The first thing I thought when I saw the screenshots of this player at the download page was "It doesn't look too bad, in fact it looks kinda cool...", but then that wouldn't really sell me on an AUDIO player. I could see some decent features in the screenshots... looks like a direct competitor of Winamp.

Installation
The install was good enough, it let me choose which extensions I wanted to associate it with. Being as cynical and stubborn as I am, I chose none, and left the Winamp associations intact. I didn't get to chose not to have a desktop icon though! I had to MANUALLY delete it (Okay, so that's not a big problem, in fact it's probably not a problem at all, but it bothers me). I don't have any real problems with the installation; it went smoothly.

First Launch:
What was that? The two components of the player flew into the screen and joined together. That was kinda cool. The freeform shape of the skin is nice. Okay, let's play a song...

Sound Quality:
I tried UltraPlayer with a few songs, and I must say it sounded pretty nice. It's clear and fairly crisp, comparable to Shibatch (don't know what Shibatch is? http://www.geocities.co.jp/Technopolis/9674/in_mpg123.html)UltraPlayer's "Neutrino powered audio ecstasy" outdoes Nullsoft's Nitrane decoder (Winamp) by a long shot. It is much clearer with tight bass and clear treble. In terms of raw quality and accuracy, however, I'd still have to go with Winamp+Shibatch. UltraPlayer is up there, but not all the way up there.
I was dismayed to see that I couldn't control the I/O plugins a la Winamp, or even tweak the default decoder settings.

Interface:
Ooops, I accidentally closed the big window with all the important stuff in it. I have to (what?) double click on the main window? I'd probably know that if I'd read the help... I would've read the help if I could find it. The help was under (*sigh*) "Options". It bothered me the first time around that the interface was not very intuitive and self-teaching. Once you get used to it, however, it becomes rather nice, as there are not a lot of buttons or menus cluttering up the window. I still didn't know that you had to double right click (what? I've never done this in my life!) to change skins.
The irony of this is that a tooltip pops up in the top of the main window for buttons that are pretty self explanatory, but you have no way of knowing the other stuff.
The volume and balance control are a little difficult to get used to, as they emulate knobs, rather than being straight sliders.
The included "gargoyle" skin is a little nasty, I don't think i want my mp3 player looking like that. Another thing that bothered me, but was probably unavoidable, was the aliasing on the rounded edges of the skin. It looks fine against a black background, but on white... (like the browser window) it looks pretty bad.
UltraPlayer is a commendable attempt at making the entire player extensible and fully skinnable, but there are still a few windows that aren't (all the sub windows of options, as well as right click menus). I have yet to see a fully skinned player that doesn't rely on Microsoft's window drawing.
I found it interesting that each feature of the player could only be viewed one at a time, as opposed to Winamp's multiple windows that lock together. This is rather nice, as it's less clutter, and you're not really going to be using two of the windows at the same time... however...

Ahhhh! Ads!
Every time you change window modes (eq, playlist, options, vis, tuner) an ad shows up in the window space long enough for you to read it, THEN it goes to whatever button you clicked. This gets really annoying because of the delay, you have to wait for the ad to go away before you can do anything. If there must be ads, I would really prefer a passive ad, that's always there in it's own window and doesn't interfere. The ads also show up every time you start the player. UltraPlayer has lost my vote if it continues to display ads in future versions.

Other Features:
The 10 band equalizer is decent, and comes with a few presets, but not nearly as many as Winamp. It bothers a little that it doesn't display the frequencies for each band.
The inclusion of an internet radio tuner is interesting, but all it does is launch up the browser window for the internet radio page.
The visualization plugins are only displayed in the main window, and I couldn't figure out how to make them fullscreen... I don't think you can.

In conclusion...
UltraPlayer is a pretty strong Audio player, but I really can't stand the ads. All of its good points are cancelled out by the ads. The interface is usable, but takes a little getting used to. I think if i had my way, we'd all be using a terminal based mp3 player anyway.




Recommended: No