Blaze Media Pro Our Likes and Dislikes Douglas Smith
First, we liked the interface--most options are readily available and well defined for the user. When playing MP3 or WAV files, a counter shows how far you have progressed and how much time is remaining on the track that is playing. When you play a video, a window displays the video playing and it can be enlarged to suit your taste without any great loss of clarity. Another nice feature is that you can have both audio and video selections in your playlist and regardless of format, the selection will play. You can have multiple playlist and play them by either selection from a menu or right mouse click while pointing to the list itself. There is also both a Media and Master Volume control on the interface, giving you full control of how your media will be played. There are various skins that you can select to change the appearance of Blaze if the gray look doesn't suit your taste. Included with Blaze is a useful Audio Editor that allows you to create any sound mix that you would like with your music, and also an Audio merge tool for combining those sounds with other selections. There's an MP3 Tag Editor for labeling your tunes, and a selection for CDDB Information when dealing with those CD's.
Drawbacks? One problem we had was that while trying to import a rather large playlist of MP3's our system kept locking up--to the point that we had to restart each time. Now granted the list was very large, probably over 150 MP3's, which could have had something to do with this problem. We couldn't find anything in the documentation about a size limitation on playlist, so we just assumed that you should keep the size down a bit when setting up your playbacks. We were surpsied to find that even though we had "Assume Video for ASF" selected as one of our choices, each time we tried to open a file of this format we were asked if we wanted Video or Audio for playback. This could be a setting that we just missed or a small bug in the program. One last point that we noticed and that is that there doesn't seem to be a way to convert ASF type format to any other format, say MPEG or AVI, something that we hope someone soon comes up with.
How Well Did It Stack Up? Blaze is a really complete application if multimedia is your thing, and you listen to various formats of the same. Also, if you do a lot of conversions of music and video, you can't go wrong with this one at all. Other products out there can do some of the things that Blaze can do such as RealPlayer, RealProducer, Windows Media Player, etc., but none give you the flexibility that you get with Blaze! With its massive ability to convert, manage, and control your multimedia this one is a hands down winner!
