Media players come in all forms and shapes, from massive programs like Windows Media Player to lightweight programs.
The majority of programs display a graphical user interface that you use to control playback and player functionality.
Meson Player, the successor of Stealth Player, is different as it does not offer a graphical user interface.
The only indication that the player is running is a system tray icon (or the equivalent on Mac and Linux systems since it is cross-platform) and the playing of music of course.
The main idea behind Meson Player is to get the player interface out of the way without sacrificing functionality.
The program supports a variety of music formats including mp3, ogg, wav, mod, flac, midi and dozen others, and can play Internet radio and playlists on top of that.
If you have installed the player on Windows you can send songs to it by right-clicking on folders or individual audio files and selecting the open in Meson Player context menu option.
It is alternatively possible to associate the player with certain media formats so that it is loaded whenever you click on these formats on your system.
Music starts to play immediately afterwards until you end it. You can do so from the system tray but also using hotkeys that the player supports.
The player supports multimedia keys if the keyboard that you are using supports them. Basic controls are mapped to the numpad as well.
The most important keys there are Numpad 5 to toggle stop and play, Numpad 8 and 2 to increase or decrease the volume, and Numpad 4 and 6 to load the previous and next track.
You can control system volume as well using Numpad 1 and 3 (down and up). Note that there is no modifier key on Windows for Numpad hotkeys.
To play Internet radio, you either need to make Meson Player the default media player on the system, associate with Internet radio playlist files, or download these playlists to the local system first and load them afterwards in the player.
A couple of other features have been packed into the player on top of that. It supports Last.fm scrobbling, supports the saving of playlists and command line support.
So who is this player for?
If you compare Meson Player’s functionality to popular music players such as AIMP or Winamp you will notice that they support a similar functionality. You can run them in the system tray if you want and control them via hotkeys.
That requires a little bit of configuration though especially if you want easy to use hotkeys to control playback and don’t have media keys on your keyboard.
One of the advantages of Meson Player is that it is using less RAM than most other players.