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I found a jewel of a program: XMplay

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urlwolf:
 XMPlay (http://www.un4seen.com/) - Old School media formats player (MOD, XM, etc), and all current media formats.

I was thinking to myself:
"I like mediamonkey, but it takes ~10sec to start, uses up ~60mb, and ~20% of the CPU while playing. It'd be niice to have that functionality on a tiny, non-resource-hogging application. Portable if possible".

My idea of a tiny player was evilplayer: reduced in size, but feature poor.

Enter XMPlay. it plays everything with a memory footprint of < 1mb. It has skins, and a library, for the same size of evilplayer. It supports all winamp plugins (for me the Ozone plugin is essential!). It can connect to last.fm. and all that using a few files in a folder, no registry at all, portable and super-compact.

It uses 15 mb when playing stuff through the Ozone plugin (CPU intensive) and about 17% CPU. It pops up immediately, vs 10 sec for MM. All my config comes with me in case I put in in a thumbdrive.

This, gentleman, is beautiful :).

And the sound quality is, to my ears, better than MM (BASS engine).
see
http://fileforum.betanews.com/review/1011077179/1/view

Oh, and global shortcuts to boot, minizes to tray etc.

You don't see apps this complete and tiny often.

[edited to attach picture]

urlwolf:
Oh, and live search! I've never seen live search with a large music library in any program.

I bought I life-time license for MM... but this is almost sci-Fi :)
Pros (on top of the previous ones)

* supports track and album replay gain!

* has an active forum and community

* lost of native plugins

* Cons:

* no album art.

* most skins suck (so tiny!) but try the one that mimics i-tunes.

* Do not feed a huge lib at once, try small chunks, otherwise it crashes.

* Not supported by the default last.fm program (it uses an audioscrobbler plugin)

* No "live" changes in mp3 tags, no stars, etc

* This program deserves being better known.

Darwin:
I'm sitting in front of my computer grinning like an idiot - I've got Marillion's Kayleigh blasting out of XMPlay and it sounds GREAT - and I'm staring at XMPlay's resource usage in Task Manager. It's sitting solidly at CPU 0-7%/ 4,092 K RAM/ 7,328 K VM. I compared this to the latest versions of WMP 11, iTunes, and Creative MediaSource 5 Player, playing the same mp3 file right after startup and recorded the following:

WMP 2-23%/ 28,108 K RAM/ 597,860 K VM (NOT a typo)
iTunes 9-47%/ 48,260 K RAM/ 41,688 K VM
CMS 5 0-9%/ 36,576 K RAM/ 30,940 K VM

Crazy. As far as my tin ears can tell, the sound quality is the same in each. XMPlay opens intstantly, while the others range from a few seconds (CMS 5) to 30 seconds or so (iTunes).

Just note, I just discovered that CMS 5 has live search as well. Pretty cool!

Thank you, thank you, thank you, urlwolf! I've been hoping to find something more lightweight to play my digital music with and it looks like you've found it. If only it would play iTunes files... Bring on those European court rulings!

TucknDar:
Wow, this is impressive!

maybe I've found a new favourite music player... thanks for posting urlwolf!

Ampa:
Have used this for many years.

The Pros are huge, but it is a one man project and updates are irregular (last major update Dec '05). Some feature requests have been waiting years and not yet seen the light of day.

The community is small too, which means that there is a fairly slow trickle of skins etc, but so long as you are happy with one of the existing ones you will not find such a compact and high quality player anywhere else - try it out!

Ampa

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