Which MP3 player/management software do you use?

[masu]

I am looking for an easy to use MP3 Player management Software:

Itunes
nice one, but IMO it is too slow

So I am looking for an alternative

Winamp
too crowded with all the different windows

[jgpaiva]

Here are some threads here on the forum to get you started

https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=7877.0
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=7832.0
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=5409.0
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=2684.0
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=1492.0

[Nighted]

Saying anything against Winamp is sacrilege!!! 

You might like Musikcube.
Here is it with the colour scheme I chose and a sample of entering "Alice" in the
search box.

[edbro]

Try J.River Media Center. It is the cadillac of media players.

[urlwolf]

music IP mixer is by far the best I have tried. I went Jriver > Mediamonkey > foobar > MusicIP mixer, if this is of any use.

[Lashiec]

foobar2000 of course, combined with Mp3tag. A thread here with some discussion about the first one, including urlwolf before he abandoned us

[ivanv]

MediaMonkey rocks, IMHO.

[AEngineer]

KMPlayer gets my vote - I found it thanks to BearBottoms site.  It's an extremely clean interface and so far has done everything I want - video and audio both, though I do much more audio. 
Things I like:
- Since I organize my music by folder it allows easy selection of a folder
- It plays by album (though Album has a different meaning for KMP as well)
- It can easily record from an Audio stream - easily being the relevant world
- It has an incredible number of bells and whistles, but they're hidden where they don't bother me till I need them.
- free, not-proprietary, no ads
http://www.kmplayer.com/forums/index.php

[Grorgy]

I cant tell much difference between them all, but the one ive grown to like is mediamonkey 3.  It has all the sorting tagging and what not that i need.  Its still an Alpha build and it crashes sometimes but hey, i reckon it sounds better than version 2 which is the stable one.

[Second Shadow]

MediaMonkey rocks, IMHO.

-ivanv (July 11, 2007, 10:00 AM)

I second that. For large libraries, the management features of MediaMonkey are hard to beat. I'm using version 2, but version 3 is in alpha/beta stage and looks very promising.

[Nxqd3051990]

Foobar
nXqd

[iphigenie]

I have used pretty much all of the ones mentioned so far and I must say that for management and organisation I never went back to media monkey after trying jriver media centre. Never tried the pay version though.

I used foobar a while for "lightweight" player but lately it has been videolan - handles album sample streams from emusic better than jriver does, so I use it for that.

kmp is the one I use for viewing dvds

But for music, i keep going back to media centre - especially with the remote library things which means i can play all my music from my laptop without having it all stored on said laptop!

[Nod5]

I hope it's ok with masu that I jump in on this thread. I'd also like to find an "easy to use mp3 management software".

I've tried some organizers (Winamp for a long time) but they've had too many windows and special features. The root problem is that many of them seem to aspire to be an all-in-one player/organizer/tagger/ripper/browser package.

I currently use Xmplay for playing and for the current playlist and I plan to stick with that. But the built in library in Xmplay is very limited so I've given up on using that.

As library/manager/organizer for files, folders and playlist files I just use Windows Explorer and reasonably well-ordered collection of artist-album folders which I sort alphabethically. I've set the view mode for the root folder to "thumbnails" and have a "folder.jpg" image in many of the folders which makes browsing pretty easy.

Now, I'd love to find some lightweight music organizer that enhances what I currently get from Explorer but without trying to replace Xmplay.

Here's a more detailed list of wanted (+) and not wanted (-) features:
+ as fast as Explorer, or faster
+ something similar to the combo thumbnails view mode and folder.jpg files in Explorer, only more slimmed. For example, Explorer forces a lot of unneccesary horizontal and vertical space between folders.
+ Minimalistic GUI. Top toolbars like a classic explorer window: one small row with an adress box, some menu items, some buttons (back, forward, up ...), search box. And then one big folder view area below that -- not multiple rows and columns of subwindows like in winamp. Ideally, the "normal" width of the whole application should only be 20 to 25% of the total screen width (I'm thinking 2, 3 or 4 album thumbnails per row).
+ tabbed interface for different folders. 5 or so tabs would be enough. Also, an option to display some tabs with some folders in some order each time the program is started (maybe through a /tabs.ini command line switch or something similar)
+ live search toolbar (not sidebar a la Explorer)
+ live filter toolbar (ideally a combined search/filter toolbar. For example, CTRL+"sometext" can trigger filtering, "sometext" trigger searching)
+ some advanced search tools like wildcards, searching one tab/all tabs, filter in/out, tab based searching/filtering, incremental searching/filtering (that is, limiting later searches to previous search results)
+ customizable hotkey & mouse-combo actions (either built in or possible to add through autohotkey). For example, middle-mouse click on a folder thumbnail could trigger playing the folders music files in Xmplay, ctrl+middle click could play it in Winamp.

- history/statistics tools
- player
- tagging tools
- browser
- audio editor
- ripper
- lyrics tool

I've so far ruled out melomania, godfather, musikCube, MediaMonkeys, Winamp and music IP after browsing their sites and in some cases testdriving. But maybe I've judged prematurely here so feel free to show me wrong.

[J-Mac]

I use MediaMonkey, but I had to disassociate all music files.  MediaMonkey removes the icons and gives all music tracks -- regardless of file type -- the same icon and file type name - MediaMonkey file. So it is difficult to distinguish as to which are .mp3 files, which are .wma files, etc.  Someone came up with a very long drawn out way to reverse this but it is overly complicated and doesn't "stick".

MediaMonkey is good at tagging and organizing - as long as you don't care which types of files are which!  (BTW, this has been a feature request for about two years that I know of, but no indication from the developer.)

In the meantime I have all sound files associated with WMP 11.

[taichimaster]

+1 on MediaMonkey

[Curt]

I am looking for an easy to use MP3 Player management Software:

Itunes
nice one, but IMO it is too slow

So I am looking for an alternative

Winamp
too crowded with all the different windows

-masu (July 07, 2007, 04:33 AM)

MP3s only?  Then WMP 11 will do this as good as any.

[mitzevo]

I myself just switched to foobar and I'm liking it, I haven't configured it or any thing yet, lol..

it's damn fast though.. some thing which winamp and wmp11 aren't good at being.

[superboyac]

Another vote for foobar.  I use foobar as my player.  I use mp3rat and mp3 collector for cataloging the files.  You will not find a software that will make it faster and easier to locate mp3 files than Mp3Rat.  unfortunately, it hasn't been updated for years, and there are a few little bugs in it.  For example, when it reads the tag information for creating the database, I always see a bunch of weird symbols in the fields.  Like "Garth Brooks" sometimes looks like "Garth Brooks&^%(^$$$@".  But it's no big deal because it doesn't affect the search at all.  Another thing I don't like about it is that it doesn't have a smooth updating feature to keep the database current with the most recently added files.  Also, it crashes a lot when it's building the database.  I know all this makes it sound bad, but if all these things were fixed, it would be the best program for finding local mp3 files out there by far.

MP3 collector (collectorz.com) is the other program I use.  I use this for keeping track of archives of my collections (on cd or DVD, ie not on the computer).  It's a great program, lots of features, very flexible and powerful.  Unfortunately, it doesn't have Unicode support and it doesn't receive a lot of attention from the developers because it is the least popular program of their suite.

That's a common thing I've discovered about these mp3 organizing.  There are very few to no good dedicated mp3 organizers out there.  Most probably, the demand for these programs are very very small, that's why nobody is making a good, updated one.  Any program that organizes mp3 files is most probably integrated inside a software package that is also a player, tagger, who knows what else.  I don't have a problem with that as some of these suites are very good.  But I find that none of them do all of the things the best, so you will compromise features if you stick to one or another.

mp3rat is awesome, bottom line.

[Lashiec]

For a MP3 collector alternative, you could use one of the many CD//DVD cataloguers around. They probably support Unicode and some of them are free as well. Besides, you'll get freed from Collectorz curse

A question: what is a MP3 organizer? For me, either Mp3tag or foobar are valid candidates to that. They tag files, reorganize folders based on metadata information, they're fast for searching songs, they give a general view over big collections... What else are you looking for in an organizer?