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

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

s 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 ''PC World'' (stylized as PCWorld) is a global computer magazine published monthly by IDG. Since 2013, it has been an online only publication. It offers advice on various aspects of PCs and related items, the Internet, and other personal techn ...

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 A tag editor (or tagger) is a piece of software that supports editing metadata of multimedia file formats, rather than the actual file content. These are mainly taggers for common audio tagging formats like ID3, APEv2 tag, APE, and Vorbis comments ...

) to

Gracenote Gracenote, Inc. is a company owned by Nielsen Holdings that provides music, video and sports metadata and automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies to entertainment services and companies, worldwide. Formerly CDDB ("Compact Disc Data Ba ...

's CD database other than iTunes, and was still listed as such even in 2019.

Features

Quintessential Player natively supported: *

Ogg Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality di ...

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wind ...

, and CD Playback *Video Playback with the aid of External

Codecs A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or d ...

*Full Speed CD

Ripping Ripping is extracting all or parts of digital content from a container. Originally, it meant to rip music out of Commodore 64 games. Later, the term was used to extract WAV or MP3 format files from digital audio CDs, but got applied as well to e ...

Encoding In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...

Streaming Audio Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content it ...

* Tag Editing *

CDDB CDDB, short for Compact Disc Database, is a database for software applications to look up audio CD (compact disc) information over the Internet. This is performed by a client which calculates a (nearly) unique disc ID and then queries the databas ...

* Crossfading & EQ *Multiple Visualizations * Skins and Plugins 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 QuinnwareQuinnware
/ref> site. Quintessential Player also had fully functional Windows profile support and did not require administrator user access to run properly.

References

External links

Quintessential Player Website
(archived copy from April 2017, last valid version)
Quintessential Player plug-ins at Sourceforge.netQuintessential Player Wiki
(archive)
Quintessential Player Wiki (Japanese)
Windows media players Windows-only freeware {{multimedia-software-stub

Features

See also

References

External links