You have a lot of options when it comes to playing music for free on the Internet. From tuning in to Internet Radio stations over using video hosting sites like YouTube to free services such as Jamendo or even free accounts on music sites like Spotify.
CherryPlayer is a free desktop player for the Windows operating system that is powered by VK.com’s vast archive of music. It has several cool features that make it stand out. Before we look at those I’d like to mention that I can’t really say anything about the legality of what is being offered. If anyone has information that can help me understand it better post them in the comments please.
CherryPlayer’s installer includes several ad-related offers. During the installation on my test system, one toolbar and one game were offered to me. Make sure you decline those offers if you do not want them to be installed on your PC.
Once you start the player you will immediately notice that it begins to get interesting right away. The left sidebar lists music top lists, including the BBC Top 40, the Billboard Hot 100, loved, hyped and top Last.fm tracks as well as top videos on YouTube in various categories.
You can click on the play icon next to each track that is displayed on the right to start streaming it right away to your system.
Hovering over a track displays a plus icon that you can use to add the current track to the playlist so that it will be played once all the tracks in queue before it have been played.
I had troubles playing the first song in the player even after clicking on the play button. Moving the track slider to the right resolved the issue and from that moment on, all tracks I tried played just fine.
The integration of several charts in the player interface is a great feature of the music player. Instead of browsing the current music charts, you can instead use the built-in search to find tracks that you are interested in. The search form uses a suggestion feature that you can use to quickly find a band that you are interested in. You can however also use it to find song names instead.
The player divides the results into VK Music, VK Video and YouTube Video tabs that you can browse individually. The shopping icon links to the US Amazon store where music files can be purchased in digital form if available (not always the case though). CherryPlayer besides that can also play local audio and video files making it an universal media player in its own regard.
Verdict
CherryPlayer comes very close to how I would like a streaming music player to be like. It is ideal for music discovery as it links to all these charts that you can just browse through. The database of music that it has access to is impressive as well, and while I can’t guarantee that you will find all the songs in it that you want to play, the chance that it does is relatively high.