BZR Player can handle over 480+ audio formats

The PC world is packed with audio players of every type, which makes it difficult for smaller contenders to stand out from the crowd. Andreas Argirakis has done better than most with his BZR Player, though, thanks to a very simple strategy: he’s implemented support for just about every audio format you’ve ever heard of, and many more you haven’t, meaning the player now supports more than 480 file types in total.

The program doesn’t just open the regular formats, then: MP3, WMA, FLAC, OGG and so on. It also handles all kinds of game and hardware-specific formats, with the supported list including "Baldur’s Gate -- Dark Alliance", "Bio Hazard 2", "Conflict -- Desert Storm 1 & 2", EA formats, Nintendo GBS, NSF and NSFE files, and the list goes on.

You won’t use most of these often, of course, if ever, but fortunately the program has plenty of other conveniences. You can drag and drop folders onto BZR Player, for instance, or have it open and play the contents of archives (rar, zip, 7-zip, lha, atr, gzip and bzip2). There’s support for playing HTTP streams, the program can load M3U, PLS and NEZPlug M3U playlists (and save M3U’s), and you can even add songs from the command line.

There are also some useful playback tools and options. You can normalize tracks, add a reverb effect, alter the pitch of a song, enable some audio visualizers, and more.

More unusual features include a Pattern View, which displays the notes being played (though only for a small number of relatively uncommon formats, unfortunately).

And advanced users may even be able to automate the program by sending commands to port 9859.

This isn’t as polished as, say, VLC Media Player. There isn’t nearly as much flexibility, the settings you do get aren’t always where you’d expect, and so on.

BZR Player is only at version 0.95, though, and it already offers a great deal. If you’re looking for an advanced player with some interesting automation possibilities -- and, of course, the amazingly extensive file format support -- then you should definitely take a look.