Pros
Free, does cool stuff, plays everything I can find

Cons
Reminders to buy the Full Version, limited usefulness

Being a thrifty shopper, I enjoy getting something for nothing.

Now Casady & Greene gives us the chance to see how their award-winning application works—for free. A download from the Casady & Greene website will give you a fully functional MP3 player, as well as an audio encoder. It also plays a lot of things I’ve never seen before. The main point of this program is to play, encode and decode as much stuff as it possibly can. All this and more can be yours, for 15 days anyway.

The program comes out of the instillation begging to be registered. After that, you get some friendly reminders through email that you need to buy the full version or you will lose all the cool extras that come with the program, like skin-support and the equalizer. The program lets you convert up to 30 audio tracks in a variety of formats to MP3 before it no longer lets you, well, convert tracks to MP3s. All this and an amazing ability to remind you how great it would be to get the full version.

After the 2-week trial, you get a super-duper CD player, complete with playlists and CDDB connectivity. (The CDDB is a database that will give your computer the names of the tracks on a CD through an Internet connection) The worst thing is during startup when the program tells you––AGAIN––that you really should buy the full version. I like it well enough to recommend it to people who want to find out about it, and for people who want a simple, more capable CD player for their computer. I don’t recommend it for people like me, who don’t use a computer to play music, and people, like me, who hate annoying banners you can’t get rid of telling me how much your life would be better if I gave them money.

Enjoy!

Recommended
Yes

Amount Paid (US$):
Free or $49.99 SRP