jetAudio Review

jetAudio Review
Posted :: Jun 29, 2004 by nguy0936

jetAudio
Version: 6.0.4.4513 Plus
Website: http://www.jetaudio.com

Last summer my job consisted of working in a laboratory with a dual proccessor computer anylyzing data, and to my amazment, Winamp would not work no matter what I did. Winamp would only work when it was the only program running, and this was obviously not an option. I gave up my tunes for a while and did my work in silence. About a week before the end of the summer, my quest for a decent winamp like player that would work for that computer had ended, I found jetAudio.

At first, I thought jetAudio was not very good, because the interface has a slight learning curve and isn't very intuitive. However, as I familiarized with the controls, they became very natural. Like Winamp, jetAudio provides a playlist window to either load specific albums, custom playlists, or an entire library of music. JetAudio is also quite versitle; it can play music files from your hard drive, optical drives, and conventional CD's. Beyond acting as a music player, it also doubles as a so-so video player. The load time for large video files is slow, and it lacks some necessary controls like those of PowerDVD or ATI File Player.

One of the main reasons why this program stuck out to me is the ability to listen or stream your own internet broadcast using an attached program called jetCast. JetAudio handles buffering very well. During testing there were only a very few number of times when it had to interrupt my music to rebuffer the stream.

One of the things that amazed me about jetAudio was the quantity of functions the piece of software could do. Along with everything already mentioned about jetAudio, it also includes a cd ripper, audio converter, burner, and recorder(from outside input, such as a microphone). The CD ripper and audio converter supports all the major audio files: mp3, mp3pro, FLAC, OGG, WAV, Speex and even RealMedia.

The only downside to this program is the lack of skins and the price. The basic version is for free, but the basic version does not include the proper codec for ripping and converting to mp3 and as well as other sound enhancements such as BBE. The lack of skin support I attribute to the lack of awareness of this program, as this program evolves and becomes more well known, I predict skin designers will come out of the woodwork.

Rating: 9/10
-While jetAudio's free basic version has more features than Winamp, there are still a few improvements that could be made on the video player.

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