Cthulhu Software

Minaurial

Minaurial = Minimum aurial.

Minaurial is the simplest possible sound player. It is purely an application that you drag and drop sound files onto in order to play them in sequence. It is stripped of all the other complexities that other applications have. Minaurial is focused only on playback.

It should be clearly stated that Minaurial has none of the fluff and GUI complexity that you will find in other music players. There are no playlists. There's no disc ripping. There's no syncing with your telephone. There's no way to share tracks. There's no search engine to organise your files.

The main assumption of Minaurial is that users know how to organise files on their computers and have enough smarts to drag and drop files onto application icons. These are all the skills that you need to work with Mnaurial.

Download Info

Requirements

This application was built on Mac OS 10.5. Read more.

Usage:

The core way to use Minaurial is to drag and drop sound files onto the Minaurial icon. The Minaurial icon can be in the Finder or on the Dock or wherever you find it convenient dragging files to. It's simplest to play Mnaurial in the dock by dragging the Minaurial application onto the dock and dropping files onto it.

Once you have located the above application icon you can drop sounds files onto it in order to play those files. Files can be added at any time and the newer files are just added to the end of the queue, That is, the sound files are played in a first-in-first-out order.

Although Minaurial is a simple application, you can control the application through the dock menu. While Minaurial is running, click on its dock icon to bring up the dock menu:

Notice that as you drag and drop files onto the Minaurial application icon that a number appears on the dock icon image showing how many valid sound files are queued for playing. As tracks are played this number will decrease until all sound tracks are played.

Notice that you can drag and drop the same file several times onto Minaurial in order to repeatedly play that track.

The lower part of this menu is the default provided to all applications that appear in the dock. The top half of this menu is what is added to Minaurial. It's the top half of this dock menu where a user will do the majority of their interaction with the application.

At the top are two greyed out menu items. The first is the name of the current track being played, and the second is the number of tracks to be played. Notice that the number of tracks to be played includes the track currently being played.

Below these informational menu items are three playback controls. There's a Play to restart after a Pause. There's a Stop that stops playing and clears out all the queues.

There are other ways to interact with the Minaurial application. The first is through the Application menu:

In the above menu is the Preferences menu - but Minaurial has no preference dialog so this does nothing. There's also a Support Minaurial... menu item that let's you re-register your application in order to show your support and appreciation of the Minaurial application.

There's also a visual representation of the dock menu that can be accessed through the Control menu:

This brings up two control windows that function the same. However, one is an ordinary window and will function like a standard document window. The second window is a HUD window and will remain in front even when the Minaurial application is no longer the front application.

Both of the control windows look like the above. The four square buttons along the top left are: stop, skip current track, play (after a pause) and pause. On the right top is a volume control that let's you adjust the playback volume from nothing to the system level value. Along the bottom is the name of the current track being played.

The final menu is the Help menu:

The Help menu brings up the Minaurial help manual that comes with the application. The Web Page will take you to the Minaurial web page so that you can quickly check if there are updates.