Quintessential Music Player

5 years ago today, the last version of Quintessential Music Player was released. It was, in my opinion, the best available audio player on Windows at the time.

That was unfortunately the last gasp of a lineage going back to 1997, when in an earlier incarnation as Quintessential CD it was the best audio CD player software available. QMP together with the early P2P protocols such as Naspter and AudioGalaxy expanded my musical horizons to a breadth that would have been unimaginable without this technology.

I stuck with it till probably 2011 or so, when I picked up a Squeezebox Touch (what is it with me and music tech?). It was also around that time I assembled a new desktop PC running Windows 7 64 bit which QMP didn’t play very well with, and so ends a short but significant phase of my life.

Premier League 2013-2014

If Premier League Team Names Were Based On Their Logos

Finally Replacing µTorrent

I was one of the early adopters of µTorrent, having started used the first public beta 1.1 all the way back in 2005. When Bittorrent acquired it in 2006 I was concerned but decided to stick with it as it was still the best Bittorrent client available.

I even tolerated the ads added in the August 2012 build of µTorrent which I needed to update to thanks to the write cache bug uncovered by Pleasuredome users (of which I am one). However, recent bullshit has prompted me to look elsewhere post-haste.

After evaluating my options (namely Halite which I’ve looked at before, Deluge, Tixati, qBittorrent, and Transmission), I decided to set myself a few criteria:

  1. must be open source
  2. updated regularly

1. eliminated Tixati unfortunately, which I like the look of. 2. did away with Halite, which I really wanted to succeed, but it seems a bit of a dormant project.

I was down to 3: Deluge, qBittorrent and Transmission. I tried all three, but they didn’t really suit my workflow. And then, the client-daemon architecture of Transmission to the rescue. I found Transmission Remote GUI, which I found suits me just fine (i.e. it works like old µTorrent!) and now I have my new BT client.

Transmission BT

So, I guess this is goodbye µT. It has been great, thanks.