Pogo – minimalist music player

Last Updated on August 11, 2021

In Operation

Pogo groups tracks by album, which uses less space and simplifies rearranging your playlist.

Here’s an image of Pogo in action with the default preference settings. The software can show album covers, display a desktop notification on a track change, and offers a graphic equalizer, but all of these are turned off by default.

Let’s describe the interface. The top bar has a search filter facility, standard playback buttons, a track slider, and a preferences button. The main panes show the filesystem, and the playlist. We can export the current playlist to a m3u file, or to a directory.

Pogo does not store your tracks in a music library and does not stream or download tracks. It’s designed for the music lover who stores their music collection in a central place and have spent time making sure it’s well organized.

I always consider a music player must have gapless playback¹. However, Pogo doesn’t offer this. That’s a showstopper in my book.

We tested the software with a variety of music collections stored on local SSDs, as well as tracks resides on NAS drives, and on networked machines. Pogo works well although appending tracks to playlists for tracks stored on our network was really slow, something we’ve not experienced with other music players.

¹ Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. It’s essential if you listen to classical, electronic music, concept albums, and progressive rock.

Next page: Page 3 – Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary