1by1 is a processor friendly music player for Windows. It is what I use to listen to mp3′s while at home. Before I give you my take on the player, let’s look at the “official version” from the website:
Tired of handling playlists?
1by1 is a small, fast and handy audio player which is not only small: it provides a smart and versatile environment to handle your file collection and listen to your tracks – with no need for playlists or databases.
Features
- Directory Player: directly plays your folder contents
- Full Resume play: remembers last track and position
- Supported decoders: ACM (mp3), mpglib (mp2, mp3)
- Winamp input plugin support (ogg, wav, cd..)
- Gapless play · simple crossfading · Audio enhancer
- Folder tree file navigation · Directory finder: plays a whole drive
- File utils: copy, move, rename while play, delete, date change
- Cue sheet support · Playlist support · Favorites · Big title display
- Very small size · Low resource usage · portable
- Folder compare utility
Why I prefer 1by1
I-tunes does an horrible job playing music. The crossfade is wonky and the ‘soundcheck’ function doesn’t. How often do you find yourself turning up and down the volume after each song on I-tunes, even with their so-called ‘soundcheck’?
1by1 has an ‘enhancer’ function that uses the same techniques as FM radio does; the volume is constant: the quieter parts are louder while the louder parts are lowered, depending on the settings you prefer. In challenging listening environments, this can be a godsend. (Soundcheck appears to use just peak normalization while 1by1 uses RMS compression, balancing out the average level of the songs instead of the peaks; modern CD’s have their peaks squashed more than I would like, while mp3′s encoded from old sources like vinyl have more dynamic range and higher peaks, which is why the ‘soundcheck’ function doesn’t work so well.)
Another feature that beats I-tunes hand’s down is their crossfade playback. 1by1 doesn’t just look at the beginning and end of the music file as I-tunes does, 1by1 looks at the places where the music starts and ends within the file. The crossfade feature gives you more control how a song fades in and out with another. Does I-tunes do that?
1by1 has its limits, which is why I still use I-tunes to organize my music files; 1by1 doesn’t display id3 tags (artist, album, genre, etc…), which we all use to create playlists. Instead of ‘exporting’ the playlists as an XML or TXT file (which doesn’t seem to work — most likely my own ineptitude there), I select all the files in the I-tunes window, click-drag them to the upper right window in the 1by1 player, select them all (in the 1by1 window, of course) and save it as an m3u (playlist file). Then I let ‘em play and all is well in the world. Its quicker than you would think, although not as ‘convenient.’
You can find out more about 1by1 here
