AAC Player

You’re probably aware that a music disk only has at most 20 songs, but still manages to get around 700 MB of data occupied. This is because of the format used to encode them. There are a lot other formats, with AAC planned as the successor of MP3. Although it’s not as popular as MP3, you can still play it with applications like AAC Player.

Classic, simple visual design

The application takes you through a short installation process that doesn’t pose any problems. It can smoothly run on modern Windows versions, but you need to make sure .NET Framework is installed as well, but for some time, Microsoft bundled it in Windows, so there’s even less to worry about.
Chances are you’re left scratching your head as soon as the main window is brought up. It’s not because of some broken elements or compatibility issues (as we initially thought), but rather because of a feature. Starting to hover the cursor over the main window reveals the location of all elements you get to work with, and hide again when ignored. Luckily, you can choose to show all controls.

Far from being a pro

The upper part of the main window is fitted with all playback controls any regular audio player has, such as play and pause buttons, as well as volume and progress sliders. There’s also a built-in playlist fitted with its own search field to quickly find songs, as well as options to save and load, but the only supported format here is TXT.
In addition, you need to completely rely on the Open dialog in order to open files, because support for drag and drop is not implemented. This is the time you realize the application is equipped with incredibly poor file support. Just like the name suggests, you are only able to play AAC files, which is a major drawback.

A few last words

On an ending note, music is found under a large variety of file types, but AAC is not yet so popular as to have a player dedicated to it, just like AAC Player does. The visual design leaves a bit more to be desired, while the poor set of features can have you looking for alternatives within the few minutes spent testing.