Your Favourite MP3 Software

Soldato
Joined
9 Nov 2003
Posts
9,510
Location
The Motor City
With the ability to stream music from Pandora, Google, and Amazon (et. al.) and stream music videos from YouTube, I completely lost track of the library on my PC. Years ago, I ripped all my CDs and converted all my vinyl and cassettes -- which took a lot of time -- and have a wonderful old collection of MP3s on my PC. Yes, I still keep the originals in boxes for ownership reasons. :)

I have one 100-cassette rack under my desk because it's just a convenient place to keep it, usually out of the way of anything and well-hidden. Today, my 125 lb. Rottweiler puppy got a little rambunctious and knocked it over, leaving a pile of cassettes on my feet. In the process of putting them back in the rack, I was reminded of some old music and wondered if I still had it on my PC.

I plugged away at a few of the tracks using WMP and VLC, and began to wonder if there was any newer (free) software out there for playback.

I did a search on these forums but all the threads are really old now. So I'm looking for opinions on your current favourite MP3 playback software / library manager. Does anyone still use this media?
 
Soldato
Joined
1 Mar 2010
Posts
21,778
A player that supports ASIO or direct sound drivers, is my main requirement;
so that you can deliver the bitstream directly to the soundcard or hdmi output, without going through the windows/android sound mixer and being re-sampled. at 48Khz

I mostly listen to tidal now, whose player does do that.

I believe foobar will do ASIO ?
 
Associate
Joined
12 Feb 2015
Posts
32
foobar2000.

It handles just about all popular audio codec types (aac, flac, alac, mp3, ogg, opus, wav) as well as can open up audio from within a video container; it's highly configurable; great for library management and tagging; light-weight on resources; has multiple configurable built-in DSPs ; can be extended with community plug-ins; excellent audio file conversion; and likely others I'm missing. Essentially it can do just about anything you would want from an audio player, except looking like a modern app with curves and whatnot. It's very much a classic in terms of aesthetics.
 
Caporegime
Joined
29 Jul 2011
Posts
36,339
Location
In acme's chair.
I used to use Foobar2000 until I got fed up with the playlist files corrupting and going haywire. Used SongBird for a bit but then they stopped supporting it, now I use MusicBee.

Winamp is crappy old software, with a pretty website.
 
Back
Top Bottom