Periscope Player Pro 1.5

Overview

Periscope Player Pro is a fully-featured shareware that allows you to stream music from your Subsonic server to your computer. For those who are not familiar with Subsonic, it is a free music streamer with a web interface. Periscope Player gets all its features and places them in a user-friendly interface, giving you the chance to play your favorite songs even if you don’t have an internet connection, post them on social media like Last.fm and Twitter and add quickly new songs in your library.

Installation

Installation finishes in just a few moments, without asking you to make any configurations during the setup. It is 100% clean from badware, and installs no additional software other than the main program. To use the program properly, all you need is to have is a subsonic server in order to connect to and load your library. It is free to download and use Subsonic, but for further information go to subsonic.org.

It is guaranteed that the program works without problems under Windows XP and 7, but it should also work for any operating system that has .NET Framework 4.0 installed.

Interface

Periscope Player looks like any modern media player, with the playback controls at the top of the window, along with info about the currently playing song. At the left of the screen you can see a pen with two playlists, Periscope Playlist and Subsonic Playlist. The area in the center of the window is the one that takes up most space, since it is divided into two parts. The upper part lists the available music in your library (or in the selected playlist), and by dragging a column into the lower part, all the grouped songs with the same column header will be filled in there. For example, dragging an album’s name found in the “Album” column will show all the songs from the same album.

Many skins are available for you to choose from in order to change the program’s look.

Pros

All the songs you have in your Subsonic server are available for streaming whenever you want to. You can choose which songs you’d like to store in the local cache so that you can play them even after disconnecting from the internet. Organizing your library is not a problem either; you can create playlists and sort your music by artist, album, etc. as well as group them using the lower one of the two windows in the program. This way you can see a list with all the songs with a particular property (e.g. songs from the same artist or album) without losing the current order of your music. Searching for individual songs is also possible, of course, using the search box located at the top right part of the screen.

With Periscope player you can stream music not only to the computer you are using, but to the server you are connected to too. This is quite a unique feature, since you can remotely control your server, adjusting the volume and playback.

The player also integrates with Last.fm and Twitter, so that with a single click you can Scrobble/Tweet the current song from your account.

When you’re on a slower connection you can adjust the Max Bit Rate setting for the songs to play smoother.

Cons

The Lite version is quite limited; you cannot change the skin, Tweet/Scrobble, cache songs locally, save playlists, control playback via keyboard shortcuts or navigate in your server. All these restrictions though will be lifted immediately after purchasing the Pro version.

Alternatives

There are no alternatives for Periscope Play Pro. This is the only software that gives you the ability to stream music from your Subsonic server.

Conclusion

The Lite version has many limitations and can only be used for streaming songs off your Subsonic server, however the Pro version has a lot of features included and is worth checking out if you’re a regular Subsonic user. Not to mention that the $5 USD price is more than reasonable for a one time fee!