Hanso Player

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on June 11, 2012

There are innumerable audio players out there, with features and interfaces made to meet the taste of just about every user. Hanso Player is yet another entry into this crowded field, and we can't say we were impressed. Not only does the program not bring anything particularly new or interesting to the table, functional problems prevent it from effectively doing the one thing it's really meant to do: play music.

Hanso Player's interface is similar to that of many other audio players, replicating the look of a car stereo face. We have personally never been fans of this style; perhaps we're getting old, but we prefer our buttons to be larger and more clearly marked. We opened the playlist portion of Hanso Player's interface and found that it diverged sharply from the sleek style of rest of the program, reminding us visually of something from Windows 95. All things considered, though, these are minor complaints; what we were really interested in was how Hanso Player worked. And the answer to that question was "not very well." We created a playlist from a directory of audio files easily enough, but we found that tracks played with Hanso Player repeatedly skipped and stuttered. This surprised us, and we immediately tried the tracks in a different audio player, where they played with no problems. It wasn't a system resource issue; Hanso Player was the only program we had running. Although we wanted to give Hanso Player high marks for being able to play a wide variety of different file types, in our experience it didn't do a very good job of playing any of them.

Hanso Player installs a desktop icon without asking but uninstalls cleanly.