Sonique (media player)
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| Sonique | |
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 Sonique |
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| Developed by | Lycos |
| Latest release | 1.96 / March, 2002 |
| OS | Windows |
| Genre | Audio player |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | The Museum of Sonique |
Sonique is a discontinued Windows freeware audio player capable of handling MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Microsoft Windows Media, audio CDs, and more. It fuses a highly stylized aesthetic with a fluid, windowless interface and fully animated menu systems. Additional functionality includes a basic playlist editor, a variety of unique output visualization modes via plug-ins, and a robust control set featuring pitch, balance and amplification adjustment, as well as a 20-band equalizer with spline-based level adjustment. It supports many audio formats, including MP3, MP2, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, MOD, XM, IT, S3M, Audio CD and Windows Media Audio. Further audio and visual formats are playable through various plugins, for example AVI video files. Sonique can also be used to listen to audio streams.
Sonique's look and feel can be completely customized via skins.
At the time when Sonique was still under development, it was one of the most popular audio players, though had very stiff competition in Nullsoft's Winamp audio player. The major features that made Sonique famous were its audioEnlightenment mpeg decoding engine by Tony Million, its freeform skins, innovative audio visualizations, and a powerful equalizer.
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[edit] History
Sonique has roots to the lesser known Vibe MP3 player written in 1996 by a group of students at Montana State University formed under the name Night55. In 1997, Night55 sold the rights for Vibe to SGS Thompson to use in COMDEX '98 to showcase some DVD features. After selling the rights to Vibe, Night55 started a newer MP3 player in 1998, thus giving birth to Sonique. Between 1998 and 1999, Night55 was absolved into a company named Media Science. In 1999, after talks w/ both Yahoo and Lycos, Media Science (now named IMDI) was sold to Lycos for $38.8 million USD. When Lycos was acquired by Terra Networks, S.A. in October 2000, the original Sonique team was laid off and replaced with a smaller team based out of the Lycos corporate headquarters. Because of an internal shift in priorities, the updated version of Sonique was never completed. An alpha - later a beta version of Sonique 2 was eventually released, however, development later appeared to have stopped.
As of September 30th, 2005, Lycos (now owned by Daum) has removed the Sonique website and appears to have ceased further development of the project. As of April 8th, 2007, the free download of freeware Sonique 1.96 was still available from http://www.glop.org/sonique and http://ultimtewarrior2.tripod.com/soniq/sonique.html Several older versions can also be found at http://www.oldapps.com/sonique.php
Sonique 2.0 Beta 1.03 is still available at softpedia.com
[edit] Trivia
- Sonique's bundled test audiofile featured an a cappella song snippet by Mamasutra entitled "Sonique Theme", with the comment field in the MP3 saying "Its so good, so good, so good.", mirroring part of the lyrics. British DJ Sonique released her hit single "It Feels So Good" in 2000.
