Poll: Music players

[justriiingo]

Just curious.

What player do you use to play music on your computer?
(you can choose more than 1 option)

I use mostly iTunes for mp3s.
COG for anything lossless or ogg vorbis stuff.
Realplayer is for Radio1 streams.

[Glathannus]

foobar2000 is my one-stop-shop because...

1.) Gapless playback (even on MP3s) has been supported years before iTunes or any other player decided to hop aboard that bandwagon.

2.) Practically all audio formats are supported, including several that VLC can't handle.

3.) Virtual/metadata normalizing of tracks throughout a diverse collection, with alternate modes for individual tracks or continuous listenings of entire albums. This feature is called ReplayGain, and the bigger your collection gets, the more important it becomes.

3.) All audio that's played on Windows, is supposed to be routed through a compoment called "kmixer" before you finally hear it, and kmixer has an audible impact on the sound. Kernel Streaming is a feature that lets you bypass kmixer so you can hear the music the way it was meant to be heard, which is a principle that should go hand-in-hand with anyone who takes lossless seriously. I've done listening tests and I can hear a difference between Kernel Streaming and WavOut, though it's more subtle than lossless versus MP3.

4.) The default layout is especially accommodating for long tracknames. The last audio-related thing I want to spend lots of time on, is modifying the layout of my player. Tabbed playlists are another huge plus.

5.) The "Diskwriter" (or format converter) is potentially more flexible than dBpowerAMP, if you want to put the time into custom-configuring individual commandline encoders. I only download and configure the commandline encoders for the small handful of formats/bitrates I believe in, so it really isn't that much time.

The only things I wish foobar2000 had, are Meridian Lossless decoding, and milkdrop. I've been messing around with the Pitch Adjustment lately, but that's more of an honorable mention than a numbered reason.

[Inaudible-Whisper]

Winamp. It plays everything I want it to, does everything I want it to (MP3, FLAC, OGG, WMA and M4A), isn't RAM heavy and is pretty customisable. I don't usually do playlists... I just have one giant one consisting of every song on my computer. So I just need something that handles all of the formats, has a simple layout and a sizeable playlist and I'm happy. Plus I've been using it for about 6 years now, so I'm used to it.

[Orenji]

I just use iTunes. I love its look, and, since I own an iPod, it's my main music player.

[frecklegirl]

Both iTunes and Winamp. I used to use Winamp exclusively until I got an iPod and then iTunes kind of took over. I mostly use Winamp for playing new music, stuff I'm not sure I want to go to the trouble of adding to my iTunes library yet. The main downside of Winamp is that it can't show Japanese characters, while iTunes can, and I like seeing the album art in iTunes and making a playlist for each artist with the albums in chronological order.

[Orenji]

Originally Posted by frecklegirl

I mostly use Winamp for playing new music, stuff I'm not sure I want to go to the trouble of adding to my iTunes library yet.

I do that with RealPlayer .

[Cinders]

I used to use ipods so I'm using iTunes now even though I got rid of my ipod and got a zune. The Zune player kinda sucks though.

I use VLC for lossless or wtvr doesn't play in itunes.

[cjhobbies00]

I used to be exclusive to winamp until their new versions started to mess with the asian characters in my ipod and just did all sorts of random sht to the organization of names.

I either use VLC or WMP now, VLC when I need to play a song especially loud, it seems that the volume on VLC goes up to 11.

I tend to shy away from itunes, just cause the library is always empty and the program takes too long to load and physically too big.

[Inaudible-Whisper]

Originally Posted by frecklegirl

The main downside of Winamp is that it can't show Japanese characters, while iTunes can, and I like seeing the album art in iTunes

Here's my Winamp:



As you can see I have both Japanese characters and artwork. Neither are plugins... they just work for me. The CD art in the main window I don't usually have on, but I put it on to show you. Maybe it is skin specific, if so this skin is called iChange which you can get here.

The CD art in the bottom left corner is what I usually have up thanks to a marvellous program called CD Art Display which will work with most good media players. You can get that here.

[Lena-chan]

winamp for audio
realplayer for video
wmp for CDs, and when everything goes wrong... but most of the time wmp is the one that goes wrong XD