Sonique (media player)
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 Sonique |
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| Developer(s) | Lycos |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 1.96 / March, 2002 |
| Operating system | Windows |
| Type | Audio player |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | The Museum of Sonique |
Sonique was a Windows freeware audio player capable of handling MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Microsoft Windows Media, audio CDs, and more. It fused a highly stylized aesthetic with a fluid, windowless interface and fully animated menu systems. Additional functionality included 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 were playable through various plugins, for example AVI video files. Sonique could also be used to listen to audio streams.
Sonique's look and feel could be completely customized via skins.
At the time when Sonique was still under development, it was one of the most popular audio players, though it had very stiff competition with 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 had roots in 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 absorbed into a company named Media Science. In 1999, after talks with 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 December 13th, 2009, 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
[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.
