A player whose slogan is "Sound quality is not skinnable." It plays MP2, MP3, WMA, WAV, OggVorbis, FLAC, and audio CD (to make Apollo play some formats, you might need to download the plugins). Apollo doesn't have a super-duper interface, to be sure, but nevertheless it does have a very good MP-codec that, according to those in the know, may happen to be even better in quality than the codec of the popular Winamp player. The Apollo interface is perhaps best recognized by its playlist-orientedness. Playlists can be created and modified with standard Windows methods such as drag&drop and context menus. The main playlist is displayed as a tree which may contain nested playlists, which is a most interesting feature which makes it possible to have multiple playlist files open at once, yet having the possibility to handle them as separate entities. The playlists sit right in the program window so you can see the song titles, file sizes, ID3 tags, and other useful info (Apollo doesn't support ID3 tag editing, though. "It will never do. The reason is that I don't use ID3 tags myself and the current development of Apollo is based on my own needs," says the Apollo author.)
Other useful features of Apollo include: Accurate adjustable pauses between tracks (gapless play also supported); Realtime 16-band graphic equalizer; Built-in playlist (PLS/M3U/AAP) editor with drag&drop capabilities; Support for Winamp 2.xx plug-ins (including visualization and digital signal processing (DSP) plug-ins); CDDB support.
The Apollo website details the various stages of Apollo development. It turns out that Apollo started out, in 1997, as an MP3-player. You see, the main purpose for creating this player was that its author wanted to learn Windows coding and MP3-player seemed a nice project since the author had a general interest in players (some of us might remember CapaMod). Apollo 6 was released 08/22/98, and "the damn installer wouldn't install," so Apollo 7 was released with "lots of changes and fixes and stuff," but it was soon superseded by version 8 (aka "damn hypocrites"). The point is, "US citizens found the previous one too offending because of the nudity in it." 03/12/99 version 30 (aka "XXX", but with no nudity) was released and, just in case someone wanted to continue developing Apollo, the author wrote he would be happy to sell the source code, but the price would be "at least 10,000 USD, maybe 100,000 USD. Just mail me if you are interested." No one seemed interested, so version 31, "with the most annoying bugs fixed," was released 05/13/99. Version 37zp was released 06/20/05 ("with a fix to a serious deadlock problem"). Now the author of this great software presents Apollo 37zq wherein certain bugs in background track info retrieval are finally fixed.
Other useful features of Apollo include: Accurate adjustable pauses between tracks (gapless play also supported); Realtime 16-band graphic equalizer; Built-in playlist (PLS/M3U/AAP) editor with drag&drop capabilities; Support for Winamp 2.xx plug-ins (including visualization and digital signal processing (DSP) plug-ins); CDDB support.
The Apollo website details the various stages of Apollo development. It turns out that Apollo started out, in 1997, as an MP3-player. You see, the main purpose for creating this player was that its author wanted to learn Windows coding and MP3-player seemed a nice project since the author had a general interest in players (some of us might remember CapaMod). Apollo 6 was released 08/22/98, and "the damn installer wouldn't install," so Apollo 7 was released with "lots of changes and fixes and stuff," but it was soon superseded by version 8 (aka "damn hypocrites"). The point is, "US citizens found the previous one too offending because of the nudity in it." 03/12/99 version 30 (aka "XXX", but with no nudity) was released and, just in case someone wanted to continue developing Apollo, the author wrote he would be happy to sell the source code, but the price would be "at least 10,000 USD, maybe 100,000 USD. Just mail me if you are interested." No one seemed interested, so version 31, "with the most annoying bugs fixed," was released 05/13/99. Version 37zp was released 06/20/05 ("with a fix to a serious deadlock problem"). Now the author of this great software presents Apollo 37zq wherein certain bugs in background track info retrieval are finally fixed.
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