If ever you should find yourself saddled with a spyware-riddled, virus-infested machine (and if this site interests you, you probably have relatives or colleagues that love to dump said machines on you because you’re “good with computers”), you shouldn’t have to slog through the innards of that computer joylessly. The problem faced, though, is the computer’s inability to run anything because of the vast array of malware crippling its speed. You need something lightweight that can handle media files with a quickness and get you access to some kind of music, any kind of music before you chuck the computer through a window.

Let me introduce you to Billy.

Billy is a stripped down, sub-megabyte audio player that does one thing: play music. As you can tell, it’s a very blue-collar sort of program, no skins, very few bells and whistles, just play, pause, stop, next track, previous track and volume. On the program’s site, Billy is advertised as being able to “load 1,000 mp3 files in a second” and “load files 2 to 8 times faster than winamp or media player.” Though those numbers surely change from machine to machine, I didn’t find them to be too far off. I’ve had to work on a laptop in the last few weeks that was horrifically slow, but Billy, in defiance of all the things that had brought low VLC and Winamp, ran as if nothing was wrong and loaded up folders and files in a flash.

However, in the process of making a speedy, bare-bones audio player, Sheep Friends, Billy’s cuddly, wuddly developers, had to strip away several functions that might make audiophiles cringe. There’s no MP3 tag support, no equalizer and the program only plays MP3, WAV and OGG filetypes. All you motherFLACers out there are out of luck.

Still, the program does what it was meant to do and does it well. Billy’s not my best friend, but when I need some music pronto, I like to have him around.