Rista Media Player2.5

Arriving home after a long day’s work most likely has you turning the dial to tune in to your favorite radio station, play a movie, or enjoy a collection of songs. Done offline, this activity requires a dedicated applications like Rista Media Player to be able to read multimedia formats and provide the necessary feedback.

Rough visuals and poor file support

On the visual side of things, the application looks a little rough around the edges, and chances are you need some patience to get acquainted with the general layout and set of features. Although populated with plenty aesthetic elements, the create a bit of confusion, with little difference between editable, and non-editable fields.File support isn’t great, but you do get to load some popular formats like MP3, MP4, AVI, MPG, WMV, and WMA. Playlists can also be directly imported, but these need to be under the TXT format. Moreover, drag and drop is not supported and the built-in browse dialog only allows you to select one file at a time, regardless of type.

No effects or hotkey commands

Playback controls consist of common navigation buttons, play, pause, stop, progress and volume sliders to skip through content and adjust decibel levels. However, all operations need to be performed while the main window is up, because hotkeys are not supported, not even from a multimedia keyboard.Unless you choose to save the playlist yourself, the application discards all changes on exit. There are no options with which to enhance playback, not even the possibility to shuffle, let alone an equalizer. You can, however choose to repeat playlist elements for continuous playback.

To end with

In conclusion, Rista Media Player comes with good intentions, but is heavily underprepared for what it wants to accomplish, and this by itself and without comparison to others of its kind. The interface is rather chaotic, with only a few interactive elements, while the general set of controls only works for plain, simple playback of a few common multimedia files.