Hokrain is a lightweight portable audio player
If your computer has seen better days in terms of performance, you may be interested in running programs on it that are as light as possible on the system resources they use when they are running on the system.
While you can run Apple's iTunes or Windows Media Player to play audio files on your system, you may prefer to use programs that have a lower overall memory footprint.
AIMP3 is definitely a great choice when it comes to audio players, but if you really want to go low-end performance-wise, you may be interested in Hokrain instead.
Hokrain is a free portable audio player for Windows supporting a wide range of features despite its low memory footprint and size.
The music player supports a wide variety of music files, including mp3, flac, ogg, wav, mpa, wav and dozens of other formats. There is little room for improvement in terms of audio format support. When you start the program you are presented with a functional interface. The top area displays a file and folder browser that you can make use of to browse to folders containing audio files or playlists to play them right away.
Here you also find playback controls, information about the song that is currently playing, as well as a link to the program's settings. Here you can switch the player's theme, configure hotkeys for all core features it makes available, use plugins or configure the scrobbler if you are a last.fm user.
The author of the application has integrated several interesting features into the application that improve it significantly. The player remembers the listening order and displays tracks that have been played semi-transparent, and instant search that works in any folder or playlists.
While you can use the player on a local system, you can also add it to a music DVD, CD, or Flash drive that you carry around with you to play music on any computer system running the Windows operating system. The player uses roughly 6 Megabytes of RAM when it is playing music.
Verdict
If you are looking for a low-resource player for Windows that is available as a portable application, then look no further than Hokrain. It's out-of-the-box feature set is sufficient to play nearly any music format you throw at the player. While it can't be compared feature-wise to AIMP3 or iTunes, it is certainly an alternative if you just want to play music.
The warning message about AAC streams when you load streams is because you don’t have the free Orban AAC/aacPlus Player Plugin installed.
http://codecpack.co/download/Orban-aacPlus-Player-Plugin.html
Justin, thanks for the information.
does this support AAC ? or only mp3 streaming
I’d say it supports all pls streams but I have not tried that so cannot verify it 100%.
Thank you Martin for a most informative and viable solution (it allowed me to play streams from a Netherland internet radio station in my WMP)! Continued success to you!
Barnabas (USA)
Your steps’ recommendation is still valid until 7th October 2012.. Thank you very much !!
Thank you!
You must convert file.pls to file.m3u
because file.pls open with winamp and file.m3u open with wmp.
Hi
2017 still kicking on Windows 7
Thx a ton
Hey, even i can do it, i stumbled through it and it works great! The only instruction advice i will add as i had to figure this out, when the wmp box opens that says save or open the bar on right says wmp click that drop down and select “open pls in wmp” once you do that it will work . Took me quite some time to discover that as i am no computer expert by any means. Having said that, previously i had downloaded codec packages and something about aac. None did any good. This rocks, i listen to a lot of internet radio and a number of them have dropped flash player and getting wmp to work had been a nightmare. So many thanks for this great solution to another problem that Micro-Hell will not even address. Peace- Out
openplsinwmp came in a zip file. I unpacked it, and didn’t find anything that looks like an executable, and even the files in the “doc” folder were in a format windows didn’t recognize. I’m not stupid. you said it would open effortlessly. It didn’t. This a rabbit hole I don’t want to go down.