A very nice music and video player I had heard about TeenSpirit (TS) a while ago but thought it was just like all the rest. Silly me. Yesterday I was setting up a spare computer to use as a jukebox when we have visitors of all ages and I wanted a programme that was easy to understand and use. I want visitors to be able to easily locate a song and queue it up but I also want it to keep playing random songs if no one has added to the queue. Several years ago I tried to find something to do this (for free of course) and downloaded many, many programmes of which none achieved what I wanted. Now I have found TeenSpirit which is almost perfect. Not just that I will be using it as my regular player on my pc.

Apart from playing most of the common music formats TeenSpirit will also play video files. I've tested it with flv, avi and wmv files. I haven't worked out how to change the size of the video though. TeenSpirit comes with quite a few skins and if you don't like them you can make your own quite easily as I did. The screenshot below is showing TS being used just for music, no visuals. It is using the skin I created called Jukebox

When you first open TS it will ask you for the location of the files you want to add. You can update this or add more at any time by clicking the TS menu button at the bottom left of the screen, the tree pane or music browser.

The files found will be shown in the top left pane sorted by artists with at least 3 titles by default but this can be changed. Clicking the round, silvery icon in the top left corner of any pane will give you access to other options. For this tree pane you can set different filters, sort by many tags, group and change the style of the pane. In my screenshot above I have it set to the basic Style 1 however there are 6 styles most of which allow for viewing album art which can be downloaded, a feature I have not tried.

When you click on a listed item in the tree pane the contents will be shown in the top right pane, the tracklist, just like in windows explorer. Select something in here and hit the backspace key and that song or video clip will be queued up to play next. Right clicking a file in tracklist gives you access to several options, one of which is properties which includes a basic tag editor which is really handy for fixing those incorrect tags. Right clicking the column headings lets you chose which columns you want to show. There are many more available than what I use.

So the current list of items are shown in the bottom left pane, the playlist. Here again you have several options to chose from.

Lastly we come to the visualization pane at the bottom right. In the first screenshot on this page I have it turned off to make room for more track names but you need to have this pane open to view video or see special info and there is even a browser window available from here.

One other thing I haven't mentioned (there are probably heaps of things actually) but there is a really handy search box at the top right of the screen which appears to search in every format. If I type in part of the name of a folder of music I know I have it will show me all the songs in that folder.

[Update] I guess I got a bit eager to get this review out and hadn't had the time to delve into the rest of this programme's abilities. Well this morning I've started on the album pics, artist pics, lyrics and artist biographies and I'm finding it fun and simple. Right click on an artist name in the tree pane and chose Artist Bio or Artist pic and if it's available it will be automatically downloaded. Right click on a title in the Track list and choose "google lyrics" - lyrics (don't ask me what tablatures are) and if the lyrics are available they too will be downloaded.

I also need to mention the game part. There is a fun little game where part of a song is played and you get to say which song it is out of a choice of 4, racing against the clock. The thing is, it will be a song from your own "library" so you are bound to know it. A great time waster :)

This programme is outstanding. All this packed into just over 2MB of download and just over 5MB when installed. It seems to use little system resources, it opens quickly and is just a delight to use. Thankyou Alex for sharing this with us.