Quintessential Player (also called QMP and formerly QCD) was a freeware, multi-format
media player developed by Paul Quinn.
Quintessential Player began life in 1997 as a CD-only player for Windows, when it was known as Quintessential CD Player (hence the 'QCD' moniker associated with the player). Over the years, Quintessential Player gained support for playing
MP3s and other audio formats, video playback, and an optional media library was added to the player. This latter addition gave rise to the use of the name Quintessential Media Player, or QMP for short.
PC World Magazine named Quintessential Player as one of their choices for 'Best Media Player', and it was also selected for inclusion in the Pricelessware list of best freeware.
It was the only way of submitting
audio metadata (on CD tracks, artists, etc. as created by a
tag editor) to
Gracenote's
CD database other than
iTunes
iTunes () is a software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mul ...
, and was still listed as such even in 2019.
Features
Quintessential Player natively supported:
*
MP3,
Ogg,
WAV, and
CD Playback
*Video Playback with the aid of External
Codecs
*Full Speed
CD Ripping
*
MP3 Encoding
*
Streaming Audio
*
Tag Editing
*
Gracenote CDDB
*
Crossfading &
EQ
*Multiple
Visualizations
*
Skins and
Plugins
Plug-in, plug in or plugin may refer to:
* Plug-in (computing) is a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program.
** Audio plug-in, adds audio signal processing features
** Photoshop plugin, a piece of software t ...
A wide range of audio formats playable via the use of ''plugins'',
Audioscrobbler support (also supplied via a plugin) and many more
skins allowing the customization of the players interface were obtainable from the Quinnware
Quinnware
/ref> site.
Quintessential Player also had fully functional Windows profile support and did not require administrator user access to run properly.
See also
*Comparison of audio player software
The following comparison of audio players compares general and technical information for a number of software media player programs. For the purpose of this comparison, "audio players" are defined as any media player explicitly designed to play ...
References
External links
Quintessential Player Website
(archived copy from April 2017, last valid version)
Quintessential Player plug-ins at Sourceforge.net
Quintessential Player Wiki
(archive)
Quintessential Player Wiki (Japanese)
Windows media players
Windows-only freeware
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