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Main Area and Open Discussion => General Software Discussion => Topic started by: moerl on August 05, 2007, 12:14 AM

Title: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: moerl on August 05, 2007, 12:14 AM
Well?
I currently use iTunes because I'm tied to it because of my iPhone. I just realized, however, that just because I have to have iTunes to sync the computer with the iPhone, I don't *have to* listen to music on the PC using iTunes.

I also use Last.fm and their app works fine on my system except for one thing: to start, it requires an ok via UAC. Now, since it launches itself automatically as soon as I start iTunes, I have to "approve" Last.fm's launch each time I do so. Pretty annoying!

The ideal solution would be to find a player that has native Last.fm support, and while they're out there, they're not very easy to find. I know Albumplayer has native support, but that's shareware and not what I'm looking for anyway.

So, what do you use as your music player? Secondly, if you know of any players with native Last.fm support as well as Vista compatibility, let me know.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: icekin on August 05, 2007, 03:19 AM
I currently use foobar (http://www.foobar2000.org/) on Windows and Amarok (http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Download) on Linux. Foobar has a plugin with native last.fm support, so no need to install last.fm player. Another alternative is musikCube (http://www.musikcube.com/) on Windows. Foobar and musikCube work on Vista, but I am not sure if all the plugins are fully compatible.

foobar is good but can be a little complex to set up to your liking. Its customizability is superior to any other music player. musikCube has a much easier and just works out of the box, much like iTunes.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: lanux128 on August 05, 2007, 03:56 AM
i usually go for all-in-one media players and currently i'm using the truly awesome KMPlayer, which i came to know about from this thread (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=8081.0).. :)

• https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=8081.0
• http://www.kmplayer.com/forums/index.php

Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: masu on August 05, 2007, 04:58 AM
Winamp and Windows Media Player 11 for Organization  :Thmbsup:
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Ehtyar on August 05, 2007, 06:09 AM
XMPlay (http://support.xmplay.com/) (alt (http://www.un4seen.com/)) for playback, Winamp for ripping.

Ehtyar.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: allen on August 05, 2007, 06:28 AM
I use VUPlayer (http://www.vuplayer.com/vuplayer.php) -- it's small, no frills but has great sound output and has all the features I need for simple listening.  It has native support for last.fm (audioscrobbler). Supports shoutcast/mp3 streams as well and has a number of visualization options, if you like that sort of thing.  As you can see, though--it's a player not a manager--just a simple playlist.

[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]

VUPlayer is a freeware multi-format audio player for Windows
supporting the following formats:

MOD • Sound/Noise/ProTracker
MTM • MultiTracker
S3M • ScreamTracker
XM • FastTracker
IT • ImpulseTracker
MO3 • MO3 Packer
MP3 • MPEG Audio
MP4 • QuickTime MPEG-4 (AAC/Apple Lossless)
MPC • Musepack
OGG • Ogg Vorbis
FLAC • Free Lossless Audio Codec
APE • Monkey's Audio
WV • WavPack
AIFF • Audio Interchange File Format
WMA • Windows Media Audio
WAV • Windows PCM/ACM
MIDI • Musical Instrument Digital Interface
CD • Audio CD
•

Features include:

• gapless playback •
• MP3/OGG/WMA internet file streaming •
• optional 32-bit mixing •
• 9-band graphic equalizer •
• volume, balance & pitch controls •
• full system tray functionality •
• timer playback/screen saver feature •
• configurable system-wide hotkeys •
• support for multiple visuals via a plug-in system •
• digital audio extraction •
• encoding to Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, APE, WMA & WV formats •
• Audioscrobbler support •
• remote freedb support •
• CD-Text support •
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: PhilB66 on August 05, 2007, 07:36 AM
VLC (http://www.videolan.org/) is my media player of choice.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Renegade on August 05, 2007, 08:21 AM
$%&*$%! AAARRRGGGHHH!

This is the 3rd time I've written this post! (Browser crashes & tabs closing... Grrrr...) I think it's time to write a browser rant here (http://www.shitware.net/)... :(

Anyways, I posted about this here (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=5409.msg37766#msg37766).

I use ALSong (http://www.altools.net/ALTools/ALSong/tabid/58/Default.aspx) for music. The deciding factor is the playlist (http://www.altools.net/ALTools/ALSong/Features/TheRightPlaylist/tabid/229/Default.aspx) because it's done RIGHT.

Disclaimer: I work for the company.

But that doesn't affect my choice. I don't use all our software. e.g. I use Opera, then FireFox, then IE, and ALPass only supports IE, so I don't use it.

VLC and Foobar2000 are good players technically, but aesthetically they're clunky at best and their usability isn't that great. There's good podcast on aesthetics and the user experience here (http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=326884).

But then of course, my absolute favorite music player is GDT! :) Ok - it's not really a player... A practise tool for musicians... But you can't blame me for loving it! :)

Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: PhilB66 on August 05, 2007, 08:34 AM
$%&*$%! AAARRRGGGHHH!

This is the 3rd time I've written this post! (Browser crashes & tabs closing... Grrrr...) I think it's time to write a browser rant here (http://www.shitware.net/)... :(
-Renegade (August 05, 2007, 08:21 AM)

(Off topic) check out TextArea Backup (http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=190927) UserJS
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: cmpm on August 05, 2007, 08:42 AM
yeah, i like vlc, it seems to handle it all very well
music with video or just music or whatever

i have the kmplayer too and play with it some
wmp is slow to load imo, and on my machine
and wmp doesn't play some video/music files in my experience
on one computer it works for both but on another it doesn't
so I switched to vlc as default player

Play with foobar too when i'm bored...lol...:)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: allen on August 05, 2007, 11:21 AM
I use ALSong (http://www.altools.net/ALTools/ALSong/tabid/58/Default.aspx) for music. The deciding factor is the playlist (http://www.altools.net/ALTools/ALSong/Features/TheRightPlaylist/tabid/229/Default.aspx) because it's done RIGHT.
-Renegade (August 05, 2007, 08:21 AM)

It does have very good play list management.  It does not, however, support last.fm does it?  -- The other qualm for me was that its primary differentiating feature (aside from playlists) is the lyrics browser.  Unfortunately, thus far not a single song/artist I listen to is in the lyric database :P Be nice if one could configure it to use other lyric databases out there.  But that's asubject for another thread :)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Renegade on August 05, 2007, 11:44 AM
I use ALSong (http://www.altools.net/ALTools/ALSong/tabid/58/Default.aspx) for music. The deciding factor is the playlist (http://www.altools.net/ALTools/ALSong/Features/TheRightPlaylist/tabid/229/Default.aspx) because it's done RIGHT.
-Renegade (August 05, 2007, 08:21 AM)

It does have very good play list management.  It does not, however, support last.fm does it?  -- The other qualm for me was that its primary differentiating feature (aside from playlists) is the lyrics browser.  Unfortunately, thus far not a single song/artist I listen to is in the lyric database :P Be nice if one could configure it to use other lyric databases out there.  But that's asubject for another thread :)
-allen (August 05, 2007, 11:21 AM)

OK - It's very late on Sunday night... That means that I've got a few (or more than a few) beer in me and I'm not about to check on last.fm... But I will once I get back into the office! I'll post back - when I'm sober! ;)

As for the lyrics thing... I've been really suprised to find some really esoteric music that I listen to in there.

If you try to search, you might just find it in there. There are well over a million in there, so there's a chance.

That being said, there's a LOT of music that isn't in there too.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Renegade on August 05, 2007, 11:51 AM
Oh... One thing that I forgot to mention is that you can get some free music here (http://www.altools.net/ALTools/ALSong/FreeMusicDownloads/tabid/242/Default.aspx). Some of the lyrics are in there. e.g. Closer, All Along the Watch Tower, Study Your Life, and a few more.

Music is very subjective, so you may like it or may not. I like every thing from Slayer to Bach so I'm not in much of a position to say what's good.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: allen on August 05, 2007, 11:54 AM
last.fm isn't particularly important to me, but seemed a critical matter in regards to the original post in this thread.  As the poster said, there aren't that many players that support it natively -- though might be something to consider. :)

The other day when I was playing with it, I'd tried most of the stuff I was listening to and wasn't finding any results. (Leonard Cohen, Johnette Napolitano (new album, didn't expect to find it), The Red Paintings, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)

Edit: I like free music, definitely going to have to give them a listen
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Renegade on August 05, 2007, 12:07 PM
...
Edit: I like free music, definitely going to have to give them a listen
-allen (August 05, 2007, 11:54 AM)

Kimo ROCKS!

I love his stuff!

But this is off topic... Yes - iTunes sucks! I only use it for podcasts (which it works for... usually...).

Edit: Correcting my drunk spelling errors. ;)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Dirhael on August 05, 2007, 12:43 PM
I mainly use Foobar 2000. There are many reasons why this is, but the main things that always makes the other players fall short for me is:
- Replaygain is natively supported. I can't stand playing more than a few songs without this feature. WinAmp have some half-assed support for this (well it used to anyway), but it's much more difficult to use in that player + the fact that I don't like skinned interfaces.
- Speed and resource usage.
- Customization. I don't think there is much you can't get this player to do with some scripting or a plugin.

When I need a portable player, I prefer to fire up Billy (http://www.sheepfriends.com/?page=billy). What other player can load all of my music library at around 10 000 files, provide me global hotkeys and still only use ~2-2 MB? If it had replaygain support, I'd probably never use anything else..though an option to read ID3 tags is nice every one in a while :)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: sri on August 05, 2007, 10:58 PM
XMPlay.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Curt on August 06, 2007, 01:57 AM
Half year ago I finally understood that one can have all sorts of music video files from uTube and places like that, so I started downloading - only to realize that my beloved RealPlayer 10.5 Premium wouldn't play the FLV files. So for six months I have beeen using this and that, but ended up with K-Lite Full Codeck Pack + Media Player Classic, and KM Player. They are both the finest.

But now RealPlayer 11 (http://www.realplayer.com/) has been launched (still Beta) and I am back in the fold   because now it will play these common file types as well. I think RealPlayer ("Plus" / "Premium") and Windows Media Player 11 are the most userfriendly players you can have, but as long as WMP won't handle the flashes I will stick to Real.

A Monday morning screenshot:

[ You are not allowed to view attachments ] (http://www.realplayer.com/)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: urlwolf on August 06, 2007, 08:44 AM
musicIP
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: moerl on August 06, 2007, 08:55 AM
Seems a lot of you like all-in-one solutions, meaning software that will handle playback of both audio and video content. Personally, I prefer to use specific tools for specific tasks. I'm not a fan of jack-of-all-trades solutions, in other words.

Besides, none of the suggested all-in-one players have native Last.fm support.

For video, my current favorite is GOM Player. It has codecs built-in and plays just about anything I throw at it. It's even better than VLC, and I've never liked VLC. It seems to be very popular in general, but I've always hated VLC's interface. I still don't understand who came up with the idea to code the progress bar the way it's implemented. Click on a spot to jump to it while playing video, and it will jump, but hardly anywhere near where you clicked. It seems to arbitrarily jump in predefined increments, so you never really know just where it will land. This has always struck me as very strange behavior, not at last because it is different from just about every other media player I've ever used.

I was a big fan of musikCube, but its development came to a halt quite a while ago and has been stuck at v1.0. I haven't checked their site in ages, but I really don't like using software that is out of development. Otherwise it would be just about the best music player I can imagine.

I've used XMPlay before and must admit that it is a very fine audio player. It's impressively light on resources, (not that I have to worry about that anymore with my new machine, heh, but it's always a plus) and quite full featured.

I like what I see with VUPlayer but have not tried it yet. It's default UI looks rather ugly, but if it will let me do the things I want to do, that's ok.

ALSong is another cool option that I've always wanted to try out. Now even more after reading the comments about the great way it implements the playlist.. but if that's the only thing to set it apart from the rest of the pack, I'm not sure that point alone will convince me of its greatness.

The whole point of trying to find an alternative here lies in the player an alternative is being sought for: iTunes. As such, solutions such as WMP11, Realplayer or WinAmp don't really make sense, seeing as how they are all big multimedia apps that are clunky and often have a "heavy" feel attached to them, just like iTunes. The ALSong, VUPlayer, Foobar, XMPlay and the other similar players seem much closer to the solution.

BTW, I've tried Foobar on multiple occasions, and while I thought the idea of making such a highly customizable player is cool, I always ditched it after a while because it forced me to do far more customizing away from the defaults than I cared for. Foobar is like Firefox. It's ok by default, but to make it great you have to customize the living crap out of it. Not a huge fan of that.. I like the product I use to be solid out of the box and to be efficient and easy to use as well as full-featured right from the start. I can't say I find Foobar fitting that bill (nor does Firefox AFAIAC).

Thanks for the suggestions everyone!
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: moerl on August 06, 2007, 09:16 AM
BTW Music IP looks pretty cool. I've definitely been on their site before but lost track of it. What's special about it? I might have to check that out.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: PhilB66 on August 06, 2007, 09:24 AM
Comparison of media players (Video & Audio) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_media_players)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Lashiec on August 06, 2007, 09:43 AM
foobar2000, for complete albums and all task related to file manipulations (except tags). Love its unlimited power, but I understand that for others this could be a negative point.

XMPlay, for single files and VGM. So smaller and yet so powerful.

Mp3tag combined with Exact Audio Copy, for all ripping + tagging tasks.

(How many threads like this do we have here?)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Curt on August 06, 2007, 09:59 AM
Sorry to hear about your browser problems, Renegade - I too have been there, writing the same post several times: How frustrating it is!

I use ALSong (http://www.altools.net/ALTools/ALSong/tabid/58/Default.aspx) for music.
(...)
Disclaimer: I work for the company.
-Renegade (August 05, 2007, 08:21 AM)

I have read and heard a lot of good things about ALTools (ALSong and ALShow), but have so far always decided not to try them out, because I much prefer a MEDIA player rather than a music player and a video player.

So: When are ALTools gonna launch a genuine media player (ALLPlay)  ???   ;)
- I cannot be the only one longing for this version!?   :tellme:
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: moerl on August 06, 2007, 10:02 AM
(How many threads like this do we have here?)
-Lashiec (August 06, 2007, 09:43 AM)
My guess: more than enough.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: allen on August 06, 2007, 12:41 PM
I like what I see with VUPlayer but have not tried it yet. It's default UI looks rather ugly, but if it will let me do the things I want to do, that's ok.
-moerl (August 06, 2007, 08:55 AM)

She's not particularly pretty.  The black/purple in the display can be changed to taste, but otherwise it's just a standard windows interface--no skins. (and as you can tell from my screenshot, I don't use the xp themes).   The way things used to be.  I don't care for additional overhead to make something look less like software and more like plastic :P
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Tekzel on August 06, 2007, 03:03 PM
I use Subsonic (http://subsonic.sourceforge.net/) to manage my media with tried and true Winamp to play the stream.  This way I can stream my MP3 collection to work.  Great program,  you can set it up to transcode in realtime down to a lower bitrate for playback if you keep your collection at a very high bitrate and your internet connection couldn't handle it.  I keep my collection at 192 since I can't hear the difference between that and the higher ones.  By the way, I LOVE Subsonic.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Laughing Man on August 06, 2007, 03:55 PM
Since this is Windows I use foobar as my main mp3 player. I have two versions of it (one is the default with no GUI changes). Which may look boring, but it's extremely easy to tag with it and create a playlist. Then I have a foobar with a iTunes like interface (well just the artist/album split).

Though I also use Songbird (though it's a pain to update the library) and it's still new. I also have subsonic running on my desktop (in both Linux and Windows) so if there's music that's not on my laptop I can stream it from there. Though I have to say my favorite has to be Exaile (Linux only). It's inspired by KDE's Amarok which has a Windows version coming with its 2.0 release.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Renegade on August 06, 2007, 05:04 PM
...

So: When are ALTools gonna launch a genuine media player (ALLPlay)  ???   ;)
- I cannot be the only one longing for this version!?   :tellme:
-Curt (August 06, 2007, 09:59 AM)

Well, I can't say that there will be a single media player... A lot of people use ALShow for their music player because it plays most audio files as well (MP3, OGG, etc.), but it's not really geared towards pure music.

Both ALShow and ALSong are specifically purposed towards video and audio (respectively), and their feature sets, the way they work and their UI design are likewise specialized. e.g. Video playlists aren't generally as large as music playlists, and the ALSong playlist reflects that.

But who knows? They may be merged at some point, but I'm kind of doubting that.

Regarding Subsonic, at first glance I was thinking, "WTF? That's a programmer's tool (http://www.codeplex.com/subsonic)... How'd that get into this thread?" Wrong Subsonic! :)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: zridling on August 06, 2007, 05:08 PM
Amarok on the GNU/Linux side has been a lot of fun (and you can use WinAmp themes with it), and WinAmp on the Windows side for me. Yes WinAmp is bloated, but it's familiar, works, and I update it rarely.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Nxqd3051990 on August 06, 2007, 10:19 PM
Foobar  :Thmbsup:
nXqd
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: muntealb on August 07, 2007, 03:38 AM
1by1 ( http://mpesch3.de1.cc/1by1.html ) is the best sounding audio player in my opinion. It doesn't have a pretty interface but a very simple one, however with regard to sound quality it is very good, being helped by an audio enhancer (Settings>Enhancer) that is also available as a Winamp 2 plugin. The software is free.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: elpresi on August 07, 2007, 06:00 PM
Hi,
I discovered MusicIP and love using it to browse through my library.
I also recently discovered AIMP, a lite weight russian audioplayer that works great; they just released v2 beta today I think (I have been using v1.77.9)
I send my MusicIP playlists to it now :-)
Anyway since nobody has mentionned it, do check it out!
http://www.aimp.ru/
http://www.online-translator.com/url/tran_url.asp?lang=es&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aimp.ru%2F&direction=re&template=General&cp1=NO&cp2=NO&autotranslate=on&psubmit2.x=62&psubmit2.y=11

 :)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: muntealb on August 08, 2007, 07:17 AM
AIMP sounds nice. However the russian site has great problems with the database so those that want to download it can do it from the address below :

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/AIMP-Classic-Download-70491.html
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Daleus on August 08, 2007, 01:47 PM
XMPlayer of course.  Works wonderfully with FoxyTunes!

Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: ljbirns on August 08, 2007, 02:21 PM
My car radio. Particularly now that WCBS Oldies is back in NYC.

Lew
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Darwin on August 08, 2007, 03:10 PM
I'm using XMPlay as my default player myself, along with MusicIP Mixer, though I also use GOMPlayer, WMP 11 and iTunes. I'm keen to see what MusicIP Mixer 1.8 looks like as changes are promised for the handling of playlists that if delivered upon will likely see me switching to it as my default player.

What I like about XMPlay is its small footprint and to my tin ear it sounds great!
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: armatostr on August 08, 2007, 09:29 PM
foobar2000 hands down, i just love that ugly thing.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Dr-Leech on August 08, 2007, 11:21 PM
Ya, foobar2000... I love to have full control on everything (from customization to sound). I love it!

I've customized my foobar almost 5 times in the past 12 months, not just because I get tired of current 'theme' but just I like the process of 'coding' plugins scripts, I enjoy that.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Darwin on August 09, 2007, 12:04 AM
I've tried foobar2000 but it's footprint, even in a pretty standard installation was obscene (can't remember specifics - RAM, CPU, or VM?).
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: CleverCat on August 09, 2007, 08:16 AM
Might sound strange but...the only programme that never 'closes due to error' or gives any problem as a player is...

Ashampoo Photo Commander! ;D

Great for renaming tracks also - easy as pie...

 :Thmbsup:
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Curt on August 09, 2007, 09:26 AM
Wow, CleverCat, my 5 dollar Ashampoo Photo Commander is a media player as well - and I didn't know! Nice to see it also play the divx files, but sad to see it won't handle FLV; have you found some kind of plugin to make it play flash videos?
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: OldElmerFudd on August 09, 2007, 04:05 PM
Hmmm

Nice to see a mention of Billy. Small footprint, but limited to mp3's afaict. Musikcube and Songbird are very interesting, but I think they still need refining. I use most of the others as the mood strikes, but tend to favor an older version of jetAudio (bloatware, but I like it, and v.7.x's crapware). I won't touch Real Player, took forever to root out all the debris from the registry. I won Zoom Player Pro in a monthly drawing, but seldom use it.

So much music, so little time... ;)

just my 2 pennies
OEF
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Mamoun on August 09, 2007, 04:55 PM
I'm really happy with Kmplayer, although sometimes it hangs or behaves in an odd way, it plays almost all the file types that I can think of and it has a small footprint, not to mention all the bells and whistles it has too. :)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: wasker on August 09, 2007, 06:32 PM
Before going Vista I was using WinAmp. Now I am with Windows Media Player 11. Also use Walkman w810i as a portable player.

Will never use iTunes and iPod.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Darwin on August 09, 2007, 06:44 PM
Should mention that GOMPlayer makes an excellent audio player, in addition to playing video files. As noted above, though, I use XMPlay, primarily...
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: BRossMac on August 09, 2007, 11:10 PM
I've tried almost every single player out there.  I still will install new players to test them out to see what they do.  But I completely swear by JRiver Media Center (http://www.jrmediacenter.com/).  It is killer for organizing all kinds of media--especially large libraries (I have over 40,000 songs at this point).  I use it for video somewhat, but it is all I use for audio.  Unfortunately it's only available for Windows (it's what's keeping me from going 100% Linux).

If you look through the Wikipedia article (linked to earlier in this thread) comparing music players, take a look at the features for JRMC.  It's one of the only ones that's completely green for features AND audio format support (and is mostly green for a bunch of others).  LastFM support isn't built in, but there is a plug-in that works great.

I'm also very visual.  I like to look through the album covers to find music, rather than just looking at text and tags.  JRMC has robust cover art support for browsing.

The bad news is...it ain't cheap (about $40).  But they're constantly updating it, adding features, etc.

I HIGHLY recommend it....
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: J-Mac on August 10, 2007, 12:28 AM
Lately I have been using WMP11 -- they finally have it almost right.  However I was using MediaMonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/), the free version, which is about the best I've found for organization of music tracks.  I still use MediaMonkey a lot for the MP3 tagging, plus it has a lot of user scripts available for things like scanning all tracks and moving the "The" to the end of groups' names, etc.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: armatostr on August 10, 2007, 01:44 AM
True about WMP11, i installed it just to keep things up to date... now is my only video player, though i  used it as my only media player during a period i got bored of foobar. Now i'm looking foward to WPM12.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: CleverCat on August 10, 2007, 01:52 AM
Wow, CleverCat, my 5 dollar Ashampoo Photo Commander is a media player as well - and I didn't know! Nice to see it also play the divx files, but sad to see it won't handle FLV; have you found some kind of plugin to make it play flash videos?
-Curt (August 09, 2007, 09:26 AM)

Only these plugins for APC 5 - http://www2.ashampoo.com/webcache/html/1/product_2_0718_special_download_32.htm
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: GHammer on August 10, 2007, 02:16 AM
I've tried almost every single player out there.  I still will install new players to test them out to see what they do.  But I completely swear by JRiver Media Center (http://www.jrmediacenter.com/).  It is killer for organizing all kinds of media--especially large libraries (I have over 40,000 songs at this point).  I use it for video somewhat, but it is all I use for audio.  Unfortunately it's only available for Windows (it's what's keeping me from going 100% Linux).

If you look through the Wikipedia article (linked to earlier in this thread) comparing music players, take a look at the features for JRMC.  It's one of the only ones that's completely green for features AND audio format support (and is mostly green for a bunch of others).  LastFM support isn't built in, but there is a plug-in that works great.

I'm also very visual.  I like to look through the album covers to find music, rather than just looking at text and tags.  JRMC has robust cover art support for browsing.

The bad news is...it ain't cheap (about $40).  But they're constantly updating it, adding features, etc.

I HIGHLY recommend it....
-BRossMac (August 09, 2007, 11:10 PM)

I'll second that. A great music player/manager that also is good with other media. Even RAW image files.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: quantumrider on August 10, 2007, 02:27 AM
Quintessential Player from quinnware.com and iZotope Ozone, awesome for speakers and headphones
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: housetier on August 10, 2007, 02:30 AM
I use mplayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/) for nearly all my multimedia needs:


If I need DVD menus I use VLC (http://videolan.org).

Mplayer is free and good; you don't have to install it, so it won't mess with your registry either :-)

So far I have not found a usable GUI, but I haven't been looking that hard because *I* don't want a GUI. If you want your media player to look pretty, mplayer probably is not for you.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Grorgy on August 10, 2007, 02:31 AM
I use either media monkey 3 or j river (media monkey3 is still in a public alpha stage but mostly works ok, some odd noises, which is why i use jriver too, it works seamlessly for me), then run them thru my stereo
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: dspelley on August 10, 2007, 11:19 AM
I've recently been using Jet Audio free version http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/jetaudio/ and it seems to be able to play just about everything I need.

At work I often stream Slacker.com http://www.slacker.com/. They have a downloadable player, but I haven't used it.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: wmain on August 12, 2007, 10:43 AM
I have an XMRadio so I just listen to the online XMRadio on the computer. I can't be bothered with downloading music or ripping CD's.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: allen on August 13, 2007, 12:01 AM
I do that myself quite a bit--but sirius rather than xm :)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: CleverCat on August 13, 2007, 01:32 AM
Hmmm

Nice to see a mention of Billy. Small footprint, but limited to mp3's afaict. Musikcube and Songbird are very interesting, but I think they still need refining. I use most of the others as the mood strikes, but tend to favor an older version of jetAudio (bloatware, but I like it, and v.7.x's crapware). I won't touch Real Player, took forever to root out all the debris from the registry. I won Zoom Player Pro in a monthly drawing, but seldom use it.

So much music, so little time... ;)

just my 2 pennies
OEF
-OldElmerFudd (August 09, 2007, 04:05 PM)

I tried billy - has the best sound of all my players! :Thmbsup:
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: OldElmerFudd on August 30, 2007, 11:05 PM
Hmmm

Nice to see a mention of Billy. Small footprint, but limited to mp3's afaict. Musikcube and Songbird are very interesting, but I think they still need refining. I use most of the others as the mood strikes, but tend to favor an older version of jetAudio (bloatware, but I like it, and v.7.x's crapware). I won't touch Real Player, took forever to root out all the debris from the registry. I won Zoom Player Pro in a monthly drawing, but seldom use it.

So much music, so little time... ;)

just my 2 pennies
OEF
-OldElmerFudd (August 09, 2007, 04:05 PM)

I tried billy - has the best sound of all my players! :Thmbsup:
-CleverCat (August 13, 2007, 01:32 AM)
Agreed. Billy's sound is fine, even with my oldest machine/card combo. Good speakers make a difference...depending on the box, I use Altec Lansing, JBL, or Creative. Sennheiser HD 280 Pro cans usually stay with the machine set up for audio work...and Billy's right there on all of them! I don't think I've got anything else like that running on the network!
 ;D
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: PhilB66 on January 06, 2008, 11:26 PM
Check out DéKiBulle (http://dekibulle.free.fr/index.php?lang=en&u=presentation) (Portable version available).

More Screenshots (http://dekibulle.free.fr/index.php?lang=en&u=vues)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: BRossMac on January 07, 2008, 12:17 AM
The folks who make JRMedia Center have released a free version of the software (with a more limited feature set).

http://www.mediajukebox.com
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Curt on January 07, 2008, 07:58 AM
The folks who make JRMedia Center have released a free version of the software (with a more limited feature set). http://www.mediajukebox.com
-BRossMac (January 07, 2008, 12:17 AM)

This is good news! I will for sure check it out. :up:

---

I have dumped most of my media players, mplayer, MPC, VLC and KMP, because of the new Winamp 5.5 Pro. This is The Best I have had so far! I really like it in general, but I am extra pleased that I can tell it to also play the videos without showing their movie (sound only). Nice feature when you are working!
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: CleverCat on January 08, 2008, 12:39 AM
I'm hooked on Media Monkey - version 3 just out - Fantastic! :Thmbsup:
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Curt on January 08, 2008, 07:45 AM
CyberNet tells about MediaMonkey:

25% Off MediaMonkey Licenses

Posted: 07 Jan 2008 06:17 PM CST

MediaMonkey
Back on our two-year anniversary we hosted a giveaway for a few MediaMonkey licenses. With over 130 entries we couldn’t exactly give a license to everyone who entered in, but now anyone can get 25% off a MediaMonkey license. The price of a lifetime license goes from $40 down to $30, and a Gold license from $20 down to $15.

You may be aware that there is also a free version of MediaMonkey available, but Gold users get some great advantages (http://www.mediamonkey.com/product_gold.htm). Things like advanced search capabilities, encoding MP3’s, a sleep timer, file monitoring, and more are only found in the Gold version of MediaMonkey.

To get the 25% discount just enter in MM2-UPG-DISC25 as the coupon code during the checkout process. The coupon is good for the entire month of January, which gives you some time to wait for your next paycheck.

[via FatWallet]

Copyright © 2008 CyberNet |
http://www.mediamonkey.com/
http://www.mediamonkey.com/product_gold.htm
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Tekzel on January 08, 2008, 08:18 AM
I use Subsonic + WinAMP to view and play my music, and Subsonic to manage my tags and such.  I love Subsonic because it lets me stream my music to work or wherever.  Like the interface and how it organizes based on files instead of tags.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: wilfrednilsen on January 15, 2008, 07:32 PM
In the office, I use the built in MP3 player in BarracudaDrive when I play my music directly from my home computer. The music is streamed directly and bypasses the company firewall.

(http://barracudaserver.com/products/BarracudaDrive/images/wfm.jpg)


The Web File Manager (http://barracudaserver.com/products/BarracudaDrive/WebFileManager.lsp) can create play lists directly from my music collection.


(http://barracudaserver.com/products/BarracudaDrive/images/player.jpg)

Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: oldfart on January 16, 2008, 03:47 PM
You people don't know the troubles you cause.  I am a very new member of DC and just getting started with my search for software.  Yesterday I read the Best of 2007 and found myself checking out and/or downloading several neat little programs, only one of which I've installed so far.  You see, I have developed a doozy of a disability that requires me to take a basket-load of meds each day, most of which cut my IQ exponentially.  Today I stumbled upon your thread and because I've been searching for a decent music and video player, I very much appreciated all the great suggestions. 
Many moons ago I was signed up with Music Match Jukebox for the excellent reason that it came installed on this Dell.  I purchased a number of albums and singles, mostly sixties and seventies stuff [hence the name oldfart].  I haven't been listening to music much this past year due to my difficulties but I've gotten somewhat used to all the damn meds and have begun to play with the computer more and listening to music was one of my first desires. 
I had quit MMJ [I had purchased PLUS and had a subscription to their library at one time]  Anywho, I first downloaded 1by1 and then read about JRiver having a free version and grabbed it.  I installed the program and imported my library, none of which would play.  After fumbling around for a bit I noticed that it was a DRM problem, they could not verify my license.     I finally woke up and Googled MMJ but it kept taking me to Yahoo.  Eventually I figured out that MMJ was apparently absorbed by Yahoo so I downloaded and installed Yahoo's player.  Sure enough, when I tried to play my music it had the same DRM problem but it did bring up a window asking me for my MMJ user name and password.  Thankfully I was able to go to my password keeper [see thread concerning password managers] and find my old MMJ info. 
I imported my library once again and was pleased to see it find my license and play the song.  I then opened JRiver and it played the tune also.  Unfortunately it would only play that song.  I am going to have to play each song on Yahoo first to  obtain my license before I can use any other player. 
I think I read something about the importance of backing up you license somewhere upstream of this post and I plan to find that post and dutifully follow its suggestion. 
Thanks to all you nice folks for providing me with both excellent knowledge about media players but also giving me a whole afternoon's activity.        :)  :tellme:  :huh:  :o :( :-\ ;D :-*
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: CleverCat on January 18, 2008, 06:25 AM
CyberNet tells about MediaMonkey:

25% Off MediaMonkey Licenses

Posted: 07 Jan 2008 06:17 PM CST

MediaMonkey
Back on our two-year anniversary we hosted a giveaway for a few MediaMonkey licenses. With over 130 entries we couldn’t exactly give a license to everyone who entered in, but now anyone can get 25% off a MediaMonkey license. The price of a lifetime license goes from $40 down to $30, and a Gold license from $20 down to $15.

You may be aware that there is also a free version of MediaMonkey available, but Gold users get some great advantages (http://www.mediamonkey.com/product_gold.htm). Things like advanced search capabilities, encoding MP3’s, a sleep timer, file monitoring, and more are only found in the Gold version of MediaMonkey.

To get the 25% discount just enter in MM2-UPG-DISC25 as the coupon code during the checkout process. The coupon is good for the entire month of January, which gives you some time to wait for your next paycheck.

[via FatWallet]

Copyright © 2008 CyberNet |
http://www.mediamonkey.com/
http://www.mediamonkey.com/product_gold.htm
-Curt (January 08, 2008, 07:45 AM)

Thanks Curt - just got lifetime discount thanks to you!



(http://www.portablegaming.de/images/smilies/thx.gif)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: ThalSwe on January 19, 2008, 09:43 AM
Was an custom-crazy Foobar user for the longest time, spending way to much time tinkering around with settings,finding/updating plugins and tweaking the look to perfection (and to be honest change it almost once a week since I simply had new ideas by that time ;) ).
Then I found this thread and decided to check it for fun as I honestly was perfectly happy with Foobar and what it offers but to my suprise I actually ended up changing to a new one.

Currently playing around with Jr Media Jukebox and full Media Center version of it and I am not far away from paying for it as it simply is sweet. Love the speed of it, the accessability while keeping it highly customizable, the look and just...the feel of using it.
A big thanks to BRossMac for mentioning it.

Will probably look around a bit more before settling down permanently as I simply was to...limited with Foobar and never gave the rest even a look.
Actually recommend that to anyone in the thread that enjoy their current player, try anyways and you might be surprised :)

(also ended up putting Billy on my usb drive so :up: for this thread)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: mouser on January 19, 2008, 09:52 AM
The minimalist simplicity of VUplayer (http://www.vuplayer.com/vuplayer.php) (recommended by Allen) won me over.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: dspelley on January 31, 2008, 09:33 PM

(Winamp vs iTunes vs MediaMonkey)2 (http://www.skytopia.com/project/articles/music/players.html) Rematch.

Here's a music player review/comparison from Skytopia (http://www.skytopia.com/index.html) updated earlier today. This is a rematch from a review they did about 3 years ago. Pretty comprehensive comparison of the latest versions of Winamp, iTunes and MediaMonkey.

And the winner is.....
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: cthorpe on February 01, 2008, 02:30 AM
I use three different players depending on what I am listening to.

For just playing a single album, I use Billy.

If I'm going to be on my computer for an extended length of time, I will fire up MusicIP Mixer, pick a few good songs and let it generate a mix.

Finally, I have a Zune and a Zune Pass (unlimited downloads and plays of most of the Zune catalog), so if I am putting tracks on it or looking around for something brand new I'll go with that one.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: OldElmerFudd on February 05, 2008, 02:57 PM
The minimalist simplicity of VUplayer (http://www.vuplayer.com/vuplayer.php) (recommended by Allen) won me over.
-mouser (January 19, 2008, 09:52 AM)

Think you may be on to something here, mouser. There's a nice little set of filters and audio tools on the site, tho' for the life of me I can't seem to get the VU Meters to work.
 ;D
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: ThalSwe on February 17, 2008, 10:21 AM
Just a small heads-up for users of Billy. It recently got a update  :-*

Version 1.04i beta - Feb 15 2008
FLAC support
Last.fm support (playing history)
ID3v2.4 tag support (view only in properties)
Musicbrainz support and replaygain values extracted, no support yet.
Recording with "pre" functionality in radio streams
Dedicated shortcuts for Shuffle/Repeat
Thanks all for the patients..

Quite a nice update if you ask me. Definatly ensured its spot on my usb stick :)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Josh on February 17, 2008, 10:27 AM
I have to say, I used to be a winamp fan back in the days of the early 5.0 release. I then came upon Zoom Player which played everything I wanted (only player to support all formats I used plus dvd), but then it became plagued with repeated codec issues. I had to repeatedly reinstall codecs to get it to play files properly. I have since moved back to winamp and havent looked back. Once Winamp adds DVD playback, I will be completely satisfied with it.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: allen on February 17, 2008, 10:38 AM
Just a small heads-up for users of Billy. It recently got a update  :-*

Version 1.04i beta - Feb 15 2008
FLAC support
Last.fm support (playing history)
ID3v2.4 tag support (view only in properties)
Musicbrainz support and replaygain values extracted, no support yet.
Recording with "pre" functionality in radio streams
Dedicated shortcuts for Shuffle/Repeat
Thanks all for the patients..

Quite a nice update if you ask me. Definatly ensured its spot on my usb stick :)
-ThalSwe (February 17, 2008, 10:21 AM)

Wow! I really didn't expect to see Billy updated, ever. . . thanks for the head's up!
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Renegade on February 18, 2008, 10:01 AM
The minimalist simplicity of VUplayer (http://www.vuplayer.com/vuplayer.php) (recommended by Allen) won me over.
-mouser (January 19, 2008, 09:52 AM)

You should see some of the Japanese players -- they take minimalism to the extreme! Play. Pause. Volume. Context menu for everything else. (Or there abouts.) Check out CowScorpion (http://www.CowScorpion.com) to see some.

But is there no love for the Satanic Music Detector (http://www.fucksatan.com/FreeSoftware/SatanicMusicDetector/tabid/57/Default.aspx)? Is this forum filled only with godless heathens? Where are there the pious and the devout? Have we all lost our faith?  :P


Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Renegade on February 18, 2008, 10:08 AM
I should probably post a deeper link for audio players at CowScorpion (http://cowscorpion.com/Software/AudioPlayer.html). Here's one example (http://cowscorpion.com/Screen-Shot/sakusakuPlayer.html).

There are a lot more with a far smaller UI at Vector (http://www.vector.jp/). (I can't connect to it for some silly reason...)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Darwin on February 18, 2008, 03:41 PM
Classic:

[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Curt on October 04, 2008, 06:30 PM
My music player of choice for the time being is Amy. Amy MacDonald (http://www.amymacdonald.co.uk/biography.php) 


This is the life, Poison Prince; Let's start a band! (http://www.7digital.com/stores/listing.aspx?shop=85&g=353c5f5b-759f-4250-97e2-df8604410bcb&masterartist=43474)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Fedorov on October 05, 2008, 02:15 PM
Foobar of course, light and great quality music :)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: wreckedcarzz on October 05, 2008, 02:26 PM
If I am on Windows, I only use WMP (11). The sole reason: it starts up in a flash. Most of the time (90%) I just open my Music folder and use that as what most people use their playlist viewer in their music player for: play this song, now play this song. It doesn't force me to keep the player open if I want to stop listening to music for a short while, and it doesn't use any more resources than explorer does already.

BUT, if I am on Ubuntu (most of the time now at school), Songbird gets the vote. I used to like Amarok, but it has an odd UI - and I have been watching Songbird since EARLY releases, and it is a mature and stable beta program now (0.7, I started watching it at 0.3).

@Curt: ;D

EDIT: And because I get most of my music from Jamglue (http://www.jamglue.com/), I have to write my own ID3 tags. Do that for over 100 songs manually (I have 105 total, 4 from iTunes (DRM stripped) :o), and you get to know your music a lot better than you would have ever wanted to.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: einstein999999 on October 05, 2008, 06:58 PM
I've been using iTunes a lot lately (I know, it's wonderfully bloated and such, but I haven't had much time to look into other music players lately).  I used to use Realplayer 11 Beta, but I've booted it from my system because I got frustrated with its incompatibility with Firefox 3.  I used MediaMonkey for a while, but got rid of it for some reason that I can't remember now.  I also used Songbird, which I really like, but the last time I used it, it used up a lot of my RAM.  Anyway, I'm so glad I stumbled upon this thread.  These are some awesome suggestions, and I'll be looking into some of the players suggested here!  :)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Darwin on October 05, 2008, 07:06 PM
[cue maniacal laughter][rant]So... does iTunes still install about 15 services that HAVE to run in order for it to work? The lack of any sort of provision for end-user input into what runs with the program had me screaming like a madman until I finally decided to cut my losses and uninstall it for good. I do not own an iPod and thus don't need to have a service running to enable iTunes to communicate with an iPod. Likewise, I don't need iTunes plugins loading into Outlook when I open it... and so on! Just curious if version 8.x addressed these long-standing beefs. My experience going from 4.x to 5.x to 6.x to 7.x was that rather than addressing users' concerns with each new release Apple ADDED MORE crap that runs with iTunes (and which must be running if you want iTunes to function).[/cue maniacal laughter][/rant]
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: 4wd on October 05, 2008, 07:47 PM
[cue maniacal laughter][rant]...[/cue maniacal laughter][/rant]
-Darwin (October 05, 2008, 07:06 PM)

Your HTML nesting is incorrect, it should be:

[cue maniacal laughter][rant]...[/rant][/cue maniacal laughter]

First offense is a warning, subsequent offenses result in severe ridiculing.

Yours Sincerely,
TMC (The Markup Cops)

Disclaimer: I'm bored, so sue me.
Disclaimer: I think I'm currently on a Biorhythm high and the extra endorphins are playing havoc with my warped sense of humour.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Darwin on October 05, 2008, 09:12 PM
[cue maniacal laughter][rant]...[/cue maniacal laughter][/rant]
-Darwin (October 05, 2008, 07:06 PM)

Your HTML nesting is incorrect, it should be:

[cue maniacal laughter][rant]...[/rant][/cue maniacal laughter]

First offense is a warning, subsequent offenses result in severe ridiculing.

Yours Sincerely,
TMC (The Markup Cops)

Disclaimer: I'm bored, so sue me.
Disclaimer: I think I'm currently on a Biorhythm high and the extra endorphins are playing havoc with my warped sense of humour.
-4wd (October 05, 2008, 07:47 PM)

It was an honest mistake, guv'nor  :-[
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Curt on October 06, 2008, 11:39 AM
I have four music players of choice.

AIMP2, WinAmp 5.5 Pro, WMP 11, and RealPlayer 11 Plus - in this order.

For background playing, I prefer AIMP2. It will start playing when I start my XP; no questions asked, it will just hide and PLAY :-)  But I tend to mass-download music files, and for this reason I very often come across music that I don't want to hear again. And this is where AIMP2 is a disappointment to me; there is no "delete file" button. WinAmp 5.5 Pro does have such a (plugin) button (it has ALL sorts of features), but it won't start playing in the same discrete way AIMP2 does (I think it should be able to (?), but in my setup it won't).

Windows Media Player 11 and RealPlayer 11 Plus are both nice and easy, and quite capable, but also have some proprietary issues. If I record a CD, I can later realize that it was already recorded by "the other", but I wasn't warned.

Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: wreckedcarzz on October 07, 2008, 01:51 AM
[cue maniacal laughter][rant]So... does iTunes still install about 15 services that HAVE to run in order for it to work? The lack of any sort of provision for end-user input into what runs with the program had me screaming like a madman until I finally decided to cut my losses and uninstall it for good. I do not own an iPod and thus don't need to have a service running to enable iTunes to communicate with an iPod. Likewise, I don't need iTunes plugins loading into Outlook when I open it... and so on! Just curious if version 8.x addressed these long-standing beefs. My experience going from 4.x to 5.x to 6.x to 7.x was that rather than addressing users' concerns with each new release Apple ADDED MORE crap that runs with iTunes (and which must be running if you want iTunes to function).[/cue maniacal laughter][/rant]
-Darwin (October 05, 2008, 07:06 PM)

I didn't even read past the end of the first line.

Yea, it still requires to dig into your system like a virus, and it STILL doesn't uninstall correctly on Windows-based computers (Interesting how Apple Software Update re-installs itself and asks to install more crap... ;))

Without reading, I am obligated to agree on all points :P
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: muntealb on October 07, 2008, 02:30 AM
AIMP (http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Audio/Audio-Players/AIMP-Classic.shtml) (click on External Mirror in the download page to get the 2.5 beta version) is my music player of choice, once I discovered that it can use the DSP plugins for Winamp (basically the DLL of the plugin must be copied in the PlugIns folder of AIMP, then activated from inside the extension panel of AIMP and finally selected in the AIMP DSP-Manager, where the Options button allows to modify the plugin audio settings).

Recommended DSP plugins (all are free):

Stereo Tool (http://www.stereotool.com/)

AudioProc (http://www.audioproc.ca/)

Sound Solution 1.31 (http://www.soundsolution.it/forum/download_sound_solution-t966.0.html;msg971#msg971)


P.S. Curt, AIMP does not need a "delete button" because it can delete a selection (one or more files) by pressing Shift+Del.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Curt on October 07, 2008, 03:52 AM
- Thanks for the tip, munthealb. However, I like to have AIMP2 work as discrete as can be, so I don't want to first open the main window. I want a button in the visible mini player.

Screenshot from PS Tray Factory and a WinAmp plugin:

[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]

but no such easy button in AIMP2:

[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]


[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]


- there is plenty with room for the button, I would say.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: muntealb on October 07, 2008, 06:57 AM
There is no need for that button, you can do it easier. AIMP supports global shortcuts, so all you have to do is to define a combination of keys for the deletion of the played file (which is selected by default).

Main button of AIMP (left-corner)>Hotkeys>Physically delete selected>Global>Pause/Break (as an example)>Enter (to confirm the deletion)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Curt on October 07, 2008, 07:26 AM
- that is really cool!  :up: Thanks for informing! :up:


But I hate hotkeys in general   and still want that fr***** button!   8)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: muntealb on October 07, 2008, 07:38 AM
Then write a feature request to Artem Izmaylov (the author of AIMP) : address is in the "About" section.

I wrote him usually about the language file and he answered in 1-5 days.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: urlwolf on October 07, 2008, 12:22 PM
I was using a minimal winamp install, then moved to Mediamonkey. They all use the  izotope ozone plugin, which improves qualify to my ears.

I have to say I have a high end amp and speakers, and an external soundcard. I have spent a lot of time and money getting the best qualify possible.

But recently I've tried spider player, and... damn! it sounds better than anything I've tested before. It seems to be doing something at 32-bit instead of 16. I never thought that would make a difference. But it does. If anyone wants to play with it and report here, I'd love to see if other people find it better sounding too.

It's the BASS engine; in theory it should not sound different (i.e., XMplay, musicIP etc all use that engine).

Is it the 32-bit processing? If so, why are not all players doing it?
I'd love to hear if there's anything one can do to make MM work at 32-bit, then. Because spider is very basic, it doesn't even talk to last.fm.

Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: superboyac on October 07, 2008, 01:53 PM
Add me to the foobar camp.  You can do anything with it, literally.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: muntealb on October 08, 2008, 05:05 AM
But recently I've tried spider player, and... damn! it sounds better than anything I've tested before. It seems to be doing something at 32-bit instead of 16. I never thought that would make a difference. But it does. If anyone wants to play with it and report here, I'd love to see if other people find it better sounding too.

Is it the 32-bit processing? If so, why are not all players doing it?
I'd love to hear if there's anything one can do to make MM work at 32-bit, then. Because spider is very basic, it doesn't even talk to last.fm.
-urlwolf (October 07, 2008, 12:22 PM)

Spider Player sounds good, indeed. But it does not support DSP plugins, so AIMP + DSPplugin sounds better (for example AIMP+AudioProc).

It's not about 16 or 32 bit. Spider Player uses 16 bit by default and can be changed to 32 bit in the sound options (I noticed no difference). AIMP also can use 32 bit (Options>Playing).

LE: Well, Spider supports Winamp DSP plugins (it has by default one named "Equalizer by nevi"), and they are available from the DSP Manager which can be displayed by clicking on a little button with a speaker on it, that is present in the Equalizer panel (which must be displayed of course). I did not click on that button previously because it is identical to those used for the mute/unmute function.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: urlwolf on October 10, 2008, 04:01 AM
Thanks for the 32-bit heads up.
I'll try this when I get home.
AIMP is very promising. Unfortunately it seems to crash before importing my entire library. Memory usage is superb.

Do you know if it supports replaygain?
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: muntealb on October 10, 2008, 10:20 AM
AIMP supports some normalization natively : DSPManager>Auto-normalize sound volume

And it supports ReplayGain via the "Input MAD" plugin (copy the files in the AIMP PlugIns folder, then activate RG in the Input MAD options) :

http://www.aimp.ru/index.php?do=cat&category=plugins
Plugins>in_mad.dll>Options>Decoder>ReplayGain>Enable

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=60454
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: urlwolf on October 10, 2008, 06:31 PM
THanks muntealb!
But I guess you lose the default engine (BASS) which sounds very good to me.
Does MAD take care of ogg files too, or just mp3? I have quite a lot of oggs.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: muntealb on October 11, 2008, 02:31 AM
The MAD plugin is only for mp3. But if you have ogg files you can add ReplayGain tags by using VorbisGain (http://www.rarewares.org/ogg-tools.php). Unzip the program archive in a folder, for example in C:\vg . Make a copy of your ogg files in a folder, for example in C:\ogg . Then open a DOS (command prompt) window, launch replaygain.exe and input a command to add tags to all the files in the ogg folder. The command will look like this:

C:\vg\release>vorbisgain c:\ogg

Press Enter and the files will be processed.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: urlwolf on October 11, 2008, 04:18 PM
yes, I know how to generate the tags, but I was wondering if there was a hack to make AIMP understand the tags and apply the value when playing.

I'm using the hydrogenaudio version of the MAD plugin, and I get pretty bad clipping. I've tried plenty of options, I think there's nothing I can do. Plus the library will not show which files lack replaygain; AIMP is really not built for replaygain ATM. And I cannot get the library to import all my files, it hungs even if I carefully remove  the ones it doesn't like. I'm afraid the version I'm using is very buggy.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: bugis on October 13, 2008, 08:17 AM
WMV11 and Winamp. I find myself reaching for WMV more often. :-\
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Darwin on October 13, 2008, 08:40 AM
@bugis: WMV? Is that a typo or am I just being dim?

I've tried many media players and have settled on two: MusicIP Mixer and WMP 11. I'm happiest just using WMP though... Windows Media Centre under Vista is nice as well, but I don't tend to play music much on my Vista machine so haven't really explored it (or the differences between in at WMP).
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: J-Mac on October 13, 2008, 01:38 PM
@bugis: WMV? Is that a typo or am I just being dim?

I've tried many media players and have settled on two: MusicIP Mixer and WMP 11. I'm happiest just using WMP though... Windows Media Centre under Vista is nice as well, but I don't tend to play music much on my Vista machine so haven't really explored it (or the differences between in at WMP).
-Darwin (October 13, 2008, 08:40 AM)

I WAS using WMP11 quite often until it hit me with a DRM problem!! I have a Rhapsody subscription (I know, I know - I have reasons for it!), but I did not reinstall the Rhapsody player after the last reinstall I did of XP. Planning to drop the subscription and the player has gotten a bit too intrusive for my taste.

But now WMP11 refuses to play ANY of my Rhapsody music tracks because it doesn’t detect Rhapsody installed on my computer. Huh? I DO have an active subscription for it, and I would think that WMP11 could contact their server and confirm that. After all, it does contact most DRM servers as far as I can tell. But even though contacting the Rhapsody DRM server would confirm that the tracks are all legal, it refuses because Rhapsody isn't currently installed. I relaize that might be a Rhapsody requirement - but I can't tell for sure. It's still aggarvating though.

And I know I can burn them all and re-rip them to remove the DRM, but its just a lot of aggravation for nothing IMO. Of course I just opened my MediaMonkey (with lifetime Gold license) and palyed them all there without so much as a DRM peep. Still stuck in my craw, though!

Jim
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Curt on October 13, 2008, 04:46 PM
- why not just re-install the Real thing, and let it to DrmRemoval (http://www.drm-removal.com) to free the clips once and for all? DR might be strange and ugly to look at, but it works very well - also with Rhapsody.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: city_zen on October 13, 2008, 06:11 PM
AIMP v. 2.50 FINAL has just been released

Changelog (http://www.aimp.ru/forum/index.php?topic=1023.msg40147#msg40147) (in English, my Russian ain't that good  :D )
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Deozaan on October 13, 2008, 06:50 PM
WinAmp 2.81 LITE is mine.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: J-Mac on October 13, 2008, 07:39 PM
- why not just re-install the Real thing, and let it to DrmRemoval (http://www.drm-removal.com) to free the clips once and for all? DR might be strange and ugly to look at, but it works very well - also with Rhapsody.

-Curt (October 13, 2008, 04:46 PM)

To be honest, I never saw that before Curt. Looks interesting, however if it requires me to reinstall Rhapsody, I can do without it!

I am pretty certain that I can burn and re-rip them fairly quickly; I had been considering CDs, but I believe that burning/ripping a much larger number of tracks to DVDs instead will work with less effort.

Thanks!

Jim
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Shades on October 14, 2008, 10:07 PM
The one(s) who invented the utterly useless and loathesome UI from WMP9 and higher should be shot, quartered and then burned! That is how much I hate WMP.

Recently the existence of Songbird was brought to my attention. As far as I know it uses the Mozilla codebase (and licensing) to play music and it does that beautifully (it even has tabs  :)). The interface will not be everybody's cup of tea, I presume...but I love it as much as I hate WMP.

Some stuff you would expect to be in any basic player is not there yet but it improves with each build. Last week I was invited to participate in a questionnaire about new/missing features and which of those items the programmers should work on first.

Beat that, MS!!!
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: lanux128 on October 15, 2008, 12:18 AM
I've tried many media players and have settled on two: MusicIP Mixer and WMP 11. I'm happiest just using WMP though... Windows Media Centre under Vista is nice as well, but I don't tend to play music much on my Vista machine so haven't really explored it (or the differences between in at WMP).
-Darwin (October 13, 2008, 08:40 AM)

Darwin, just how good is WMP11? your comments almost made me try it out.. ;)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Darwin on October 15, 2008, 07:51 AM
Overall, WMP11 is pretty good! I mean, it does everything I want a media player to do (I also use it to playback DVD's in XP despite having WinDVD Platinum 8 installed) and is relatively light on resources. I did try WinAmp (and even liked it - kept it around for a few months) and had formerly used MusicMatch (for about 7 years) then XMPlay. I just decided to reduce the number of programs that I have installed for mp3/wma/ogg playback... Kind of goes back to about 18 months ago when I decided to get rid of iTunes, forced me to look at the other stuff I had floating around (KMPlayer, GOM Player, DivX Player, QuickTime, etc.).
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Hirudin on November 14, 2008, 02:29 PM
Hey y'all... making my bimonthly pop-in to DonationCoder... :)

I've been ripping a lot of music lately (I hate discs now) which has drove me to find new programs to play it all. I've tried most of the players mentioned (or their predecessors) and have a lil' something to say about them... I'll try to keep it short.

foobar2000 - This is probably the best player if you're willing to pretty much configure everything that is required to make a usable UI. If you want to take the time you can customize TONS and TONS of stuff about the player. The configuration process also involves downloading a bunch of .dll add-ons that usually consist of a single purpose "panel" (like a spectrum analyzer panel, album panel, or one to display the currently playing track). Configuring every single thing is a pain but what makes it worse is that the configuration dialogs for all the panels are not standardized... the method to open the configuration dialogs isn't even standardized. Also for me the customization interfaces (for both the standard UI and the "Columns UI" are very clunky and unintuitive.
Since I'd been ripping so many CDs, I needed a player that could read the "AccurateRipResult" tag generated by dbPoweramp. Foobar was the only player I tried that would read the tags from v13.1 of dbPoweramp ripper. I was also able to write a script that would not only display the AccurateRipResult tag, but would also truncate it and do a couple find and replace operations. Very cool!

J-River Media Center - I bought this a long time ago but hardly ever used it. But after doing all these rips I dusted it off and used it to get the album art for a LOT of my albums. It's got the best album searcher I've seen. I don't know if the free "Media Jukebox" has the same album art search, but it's worth a look if you're trying to get the art for a lot of albums. Other than that it seems very responsive and feature packed. It's got some similar custom column features as foobar2000, but I wasn't able to get it to display AccurateRipResult tags at all (I guess they're written as APE tags, which MC12 doesn't support in MP3s). The program also looks pretty darn good IMO.

Media Monkey - This has a lot of potential. It's definitely worth a try. For some reason ($ probably) they made the program insert a little link to Amazon next to the Artist/Album/Song Title of each song when you select it. I would expect to hit these accidentally constantly during normal use, driving me even more insane.

MusicIP - Just trying this out for the first time (I still have a lot of files left to analyze) seems cool so far! I wont say "I'm blown away by the playlists it's generated", but it does seem to do a pretty decent job. I hope it has a convenient way to rate songs somewhere...

Player Hatin'
WMP - I'm too biased against Microsoft programs to consider it for my default player, but the few times I've used it have been painless. Also, it's been indispensable a couple times (like when I wanted to copy files from my Zen Vision M based on their ratings.

iTunes - I'm WAY too biased against all things Apple to even install this unless it's absolutely necessary. I would not be surprised in the slightest if it's biggest asset (after being able to sync with iPhones and the iTunes web store) is it's brushed aluminum appearance.

Real Player - I'm glad they've stopped inventing superfluous media formats, but the bloatyness of the old versions of Real Player is preventing me from trying it.

Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: city_zen on November 14, 2008, 02:56 PM
J-River Media Center - I bought this a long time ago but hardly ever used it. But after doing all these rips I dusted it off and used it to get the album art for a LOT of my albums. It's got the best album searcher I've seen. I don't know if the free "Media Jukebox" has the same album art search, but it's worth a look if you're trying to get the art for a lot of albums. Other than that it seems very responsive and feature packed. It's got some similar custom column features as foobar2000, but I wasn't able to get it to display AccurateRipResult tags at all (I guess they're written as APE tags, which MC12 doesn't support in MP3s). The program also looks pretty darn good IMO.

Media Monkey - This has a lot of potential. It's definitely worth a try. For some reason ($ probably) they made the program insert a little link to Amazon next to the Artist/Album/Song Title of each song when you select it. I would expect to hit these accidentally constantly during normal use, driving me even more insane.
-Hirudin (November 14, 2008, 02:29 PM)

Re: J-River Media Center
A lot has been said about their behavior towards their customers or prospective customers and their support, in this (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=9664.0) and other forums. Arrogance and disrespect pretty much sums it up. I wouldn't use their software even if they paid me to do it.

Re:MediaMonkey
An excellent media player and an even better organizer. By the way, those annoying links to Amazon can easily be removed, as explained in this thread (http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=28442) of their forum
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: CWuestefeld on November 14, 2008, 06:56 PM
Can anyone suggest a good portable music organizer? (I'm a big fan of MediaMonkey, but it's not portable)

I put my whole library onto an external harddrive so that it can travel with me. And the MM installation on my own system has it all indexed in its database. But when I'm at another machine, I'd like to be able to search and browse the library quickly.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: J-Mac on November 14, 2008, 07:36 PM
Can anyone suggest a good portable music organizer? (I'm a big fan of MediaMonkey, but it's not portable)

I put my whole library onto an external harddrive so that it can travel with me. And the MM installation on my own system has it all indexed in its database. But when I'm at another machine, I'd like to be able to search and browse the library quickly.
-CWuestefeld (November 14, 2008, 06:56 PM)

I've been hoping for this for a long time! I finally broke down and purchased a Lifetime Gold license - though in this day and age, "lifetime" seems to have a completely different meaning than I was brought up to believe.

Portable version would be great, and a lot of users want this, but the deleveoper has never really sounded overly eager for it.

Jim
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Hirudin on November 15, 2008, 12:39 PM
Can anyone suggest a good portable music organizer? (I'm a big fan of MediaMonkey, but it's not portable)

I put my whole library onto an external harddrive so that it can travel with me. And the MM installation on my own system has it all indexed in its database. But when I'm at another machine, I'd like to be able to search and browse the library quickly.
-CWuestefeld (November 14, 2008, 06:56 PM)
Media Center has a "Portable Install" option during the installation process, but it's never worked for me. It always says "You can only do a portable install if you have a license on this machine" which always leaves me wondering "exactly how can I get a license on this machine if I cannot install your software?" ...I guess they want us to install it twice?
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Dormouse on November 15, 2008, 12:57 PM
Media Center has a "Portable Install" option during the installation process, but it's never worked for me. It always says "You can only do a portable install if you have a license on this machine" which always leaves me wondering "exactly how can I get a license on this machine if I cannot install your software?" ...I guess they want us to install it twice?
-Hirudin (November 15, 2008, 12:39 PM)

That's what they usually want. Install once on machine with license. Then do portable install which will take/check the license from the installed version. Seems to be an approach to security, though some software is able to take the license on a single portable version.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: mahesh2k on November 16, 2008, 08:26 AM
Winamp Rules  ;D  :D
WMP and other players are god, but i'm using winamp and i don't need more than what it offers me currently  :P
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Music_Guy on December 02, 2008, 10:25 AM
Winamp (http://www.winamp.com) all the way! I might be bias since I started using it years ago and listened to all my favorite music when I was younger. Never made a switch since, though Windows Media Player is also alright.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Curt on February 17, 2011, 02:13 PM
... and Windows Media Player 11 are the most userfriendly players you can have, but as long as WMP won't handle the flashes...
-Curt (August 06, 2007, 01:57 AM)

And all this time I could just have installed FLV Splitter & FFDShow, and Windows Media Player would have played my flash videos without any problems. Who knew. I didn't:

Hi Curt

It's already possible to add FLV support to WMP now, by installing the following two packages:

FLV Splitter: http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Flash_Video_Splitter.htm
FFDShow: http://www.free-codecs.com/download/FFDshow.htm

Kind regards

I now have it installed and WMP is playing my flash files just fine. Though, for the time being I am mostly using The KMPlayer, http://www.kmplayer.com/forums/ , and I have just downloaded the brand new AIMP 3 BETA and am excited to test it; I was really pleased with version 2 :-)

http://aimp.ru/index.php - Russian is default:

[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]

Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Dochappy on March 21, 2011, 10:30 PM
I have been a media player whore switching from one program to the next over the past couple years.
my top music players are
1. Billy -  found billy a few months ago and  haven't looked back wish last.fm and tag editing was supported but other than that this is my favorite player.
2. Media Monkey Gold - it's a great  player and organizer but  it tends to bog down my system when I'm working or browsing.
3. Foobar - good program  but too much tweaking for  me. I spent more time  tweaking things than I did listening to the music.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: J-Mac on March 21, 2011, 10:38 PM
I play only my music with WMP11. All video and DVDs are played with VLC Player. It lets me take snapshots from videos, place a Faster and Slower button to speed up or slow down videos, and I can stream any video from the Web and then save and convert it. Has a few buggies every now and then but overall VLC is rocking for me here!

Thanks!

Jim
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Renegade on March 22, 2011, 12:47 AM
Ah! Necrothread!~ :)

Most programs I swap out after a while to find better ones, but I'm still using ALSong for music. (Currently flipping between VLC and ALPlayer for videos.)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: skwire on March 22, 2011, 05:45 AM
1. Billy -  found billy a few months ago and  haven't looked back wish last.fm and tag editing was supported but other than that this is my favorite player.
-Dochappy (March 21, 2011, 10:30 PM)

FWIW, Billy does have last.fm scrobbling support and I think it's a fantastic application.  That being said, and at the risk of a shameless plug, you may like the player I wrote called Trout (http://skwire.dcmembers.com/wb/pages/software/trout.php).  One of the reasons I wrote it was because Billy didn't support tags as well as more audio formats.

Main page: http://skwire.dcmembers.com/wb/pages/software/trout.php (http://skwire.dcmembers.com/wb/pages/software/trout.php)
Forum page: https://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=16157.0 (https://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=16157.0)
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Dochappy on March 22, 2011, 08:21 AM
I forgot all about  trout. just realized the version I have on my portable hard drive is an older one. I'm gonna re-download and give it some play time
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: JavaJones on March 22, 2011, 12:01 PM
Has anyone tried Banshee (http://banshee.fm/)? Just found out about it and it looks promising, though I haven't had time to test yet...

- Oshyan
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: iphigenie on March 22, 2011, 01:53 PM
I find myself returning to Jriver Media Centre - a lot of stuff works really well especially all the multi node, network setup.

I know there are a lot of criticism about the support but I have never encountered it first hand, and they do give older versions for free which have just about everything that can be needed.

It is mostly a thing of habit, I guess, and the newer version has slowed down tag editing a bit too much
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: housetier on March 22, 2011, 09:18 PM
Has anyone tried Banshee (http://banshee.fm/)?
-JavaJones (March 22, 2011, 12:01 PM)

I have, and it has many features I like, many features that are nice. But it also used to crash suddenly, frequently enough to turn me to rhythmbox or mpd (I can't really decide).
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: JavaJones on March 22, 2011, 09:29 PM
Has anyone tried Banshee (http://banshee.fm/)?
-JavaJones (March 22, 2011, 12:01 PM)

I have, and it has many features I like, many features that are nice. But it also used to crash suddenly, frequently enough to turn me to rhythmbox or mpd (I can't really decide).
-housetier (March 22, 2011, 09:18 PM)

Good feedback. Do you remember what version (ish) you last used? Rhythmbox is Linux only (I think) so that's out for me. Might still give Banshee a try and see if I have better luck on the crashing front...

- Oshyan
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: housetier on March 23, 2011, 04:22 AM
It probably was version 1.6 or 1.7.

Banshee was very delicate with external programs touching media files it had its hands on: deleting, moving, fixing tags, all made it crash but never when I wanted to demonstrate.

Banshee's tag editor had some nice features for mass editing. And you can write scripts that change its album organizing feature, at least one version I had let you do it.

I'd say give it a spin, even though is a bloody fat .net application.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: iphigenie on March 23, 2011, 07:49 AM
Banshee was very delicate with external programs touching media files

That is one of the things I don't want to have in a music manager (or player) - the imposition on the media file structure.

I have noticed many tools want to "import" your files into their own structure. Especially on linux

I have near 100Gb of music, i have spent time ever so slowly cleaning up dupes and badly tagged files, and I have it sync'd between network drives, local drives and USB drives, and I dont want my program to change it all and create DAYS of work for me. Yet so many do.

I encounter that I dont even try the soft.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: housetier on March 23, 2011, 10:39 AM
I have only encountered banshee to do this. None of the other media players I have tried changed files or directories 'behind my back'. I don't remember if you can turn this off.

OTOH if the collection is in really bad shape, a tool like this might actually help sorting the mess.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: JavaJones on March 23, 2011, 12:09 PM
The current Banshee release I'm looking at (called an "Alpha", 1.9.5) has options for whether you want it to reorganize your files. It's *off* by default.

That being said one of my favorite radio stations has a nice AAC stream which I tried first and it didn't play it, so that was a disappointment. I haven't played with it much more, but may do more soon.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: skwire on March 23, 2011, 12:17 PM
What's the stream URL?  I'm curious if Trout can play it.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: JavaJones on March 23, 2011, 01:01 PM
Radio Paradise: http://www.radioparadise.com/musiclinks/rp_64aac.m3u

That's for the 64kbit AAC stream, which gives high quality sound without using too much bandwidth (theirs as well as mine).

- Oshyan
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: Edvard on March 23, 2011, 01:14 PM
Banshee was very delicate with external programs touching media files

That is one of the things I don't want to have in a music manager (or player) - the imposition on the media file structure.

I have noticed many tools want to "import" your files into their own structure. Especially on linux
-iphigenie (March 23, 2011, 07:49 AM)

Which ones on Linux?
I haven't noticed it on Linux any more than Windows, less so in fact.
Or maybe I'm also very turned off by media players that want to play librarian and so I pre-emptively steer clear and thus haven't encountered such.

My media needs are very simple; open this, play that, thank you very much, goodbye til next time.
In that respect, VLC has never done me wrong.
I mourn the loss of Shoutcast access, but I fully understand the reasons why.
No worries, I saved my favorite .pls files long ago and they still play.
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: skwire on March 23, 2011, 02:03 PM
Radio Paradise: http://www.radioparadise.com/musiclinks/rp_64aac.m3u
That's for the 64kbit AAC stream, which gives high quality sound without using too much bandwidth (theirs as well as mine).
-JavaJones (March 23, 2011, 01:01 PM)

Cool, Trout plays it fine.  I like AAC streams as well for the reasons you gave.   :D
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: JavaJones on March 23, 2011, 03:54 PM
I have to try Trout one of these days. Though I have to admit I'm not one of those "minimal is king" people so I suspect it may not be for me, just as Foobar never was. But it's a damn fine player nonetheless, that much is clear. :)

- Oshyan
Title: Re: What's your music player of choice?
Post by: skwire on March 24, 2011, 01:29 PM
Though I have to admit I'm not one of those "minimal is king" people so I suspect it may not be for me, just as Foobar never was.
-JavaJones (March 23, 2011, 03:54 PM)

I'm not the type to toot my own my horn, but I think you'll find that Trout tries to strike a balance between the extremely minimalist players and the completely overstuffed ones.  The one thing that I've tried to maintain from the start is an intuitive load-n-play mentality.  Load files via the menu or drag-n-drop, click the play button and it should just work.  There are sooo many players I have tried that don't do drag-n-drop or even basic multi-file selection; it astounds me at times.   Anyway, enough blathering from me.  If you try Trout and don't like it, you won't hurt my feelings any.   :P