&nb{t; in4the past months @soft's MacAMP has come to be`regarded as one of the premier players of mp3 music files, the extremely small, popular, (and controversial) file format for audio tracks. Although MacAMP is still currently beta software, MacAMP Lite has officially been released sporting many features of its sister application in a smaller package.
MacAMP Lite's interface has been very closely and successfully integrated with the Finder. A small floating window (192 x 25 pixels) attaches to anywhere on the left or right side of your monitor and offers all the functions of MacAMP Lite, including playing/pausing a selection, and skipping to the previous or next item in the playlist. Playlists can also be saved by dragging the playlist icon to the desktop and then loaded by simpyl double clicking them. A pop-up menu displays the current list of songs in the play list and allows you to set some more specific preferences, including being able shrink the toolbar down to a much smaller tab (12 x 25 pixels) that then pops out to its full size when the cursor is moved over it. MacAMP is so tightly integrated with the Finder that not only is the floating window always in the foreground, but all controls can be accessed without having to switch to MacAMP Lite (similar to the Control Strip).
MacAMP supports a variety of custom plug-ins, including sound engines to play back sound files (18 formats are currently supported, including all the most popular), skins that allow you to change the appearance of the floating window, and Phrase Books, which is an ingenious method that @soft has devised to localize your version of MacAMP Lite by downloading a very small language file.
MacAMP Lite is an extremely well designed and implemented application for playing back a variety of music file formats. If you have a nice collection of audio tracks on your computer, you'll be hard pressed to find a more convenient and elegant way to play them than with the $5 MacAMP Lite. The biggest drawback of the current version is the lack of a time to show you the elapsed time or remaining time of a song, but that feature is planned for next version. 
MacAMP Lite 1.5 Addendum (released 2/20/99)
MacAMP Lite 1.5, released a month after the application first debuted, features a variety of small but convenient new features as well as the myriad of small and rare bugs that existed. Among the most useful new features are a timer which is now integrated into the floating window (which can display the time elapsed or remaining for a song), volume control, random play, and a skins menu so you no longer have to do any cumbersome renaming of skins.
Under the surface, a new GUI engine and skin format has increased speed and stability of MacAMP Lite and the code has been changed to 100% PowerPC native. The new Millennium MPEG audio engine that @soft developed has also been implemented which, adds support for more formats and plays back some tracks better.
MacAMP Lite 1.5 has cleared up virtually every problem we had with MacAMP Lite, although the playlist feature remains a little quirky. With this new version comes a higher price, $10 instead of $5, although youıll still only receive a $5 discount towards MacAMP. On the plus side it, like all of @softıs products, is a free upgrade for registered users.
