What is the best media player (for music) on Windows?

jkb said:
iTunes because of my ipod and Foobar for FLAC
Click to expand...

If you're only using your iPod for music you can sort it out with Foobar using foo_dop

Razor-BladE said:
I use iTunes because that's all I've ever used. Don't see the need to use anything else.. it plays music and has playlists, good enough for me.
Click to expand...

True, but on Windows it's soooooooo slow even on a decent machine, either that or it doesn't handle large libraries well!
 
My library is only about 17GB and I guess I haven't found it that slow to bother trying a different media player. The only thing that is a little annoying is the continuous updates. But I usually just ignore them.
 
Also a fan of Foobar, although recently I have been using J-River Media Center 16.

J-River MC offers many of Foobar's best features (like loads of customisation options and playback of a huge array of file formats), and many of iTunes' features (easy music tagging and management) all rolled into one rather nice player.

J-River supports playback via ASIO, both WASAPI and the newer WASAPI Event Style, and Kernel Streaming.

Haven't needed to open Foobar since getting J-River MC. Only problem is that it costs whereas Foobar is free, but they offer a 30 day trial to check it out. Oh, and it can also play load of types of video and image files too.
 
Can't say I've ever noticed iTunes being slow. Plus, since I have an iPad, iPhone and iPod it doesn't make sense for me to use anything else and I love the Genius playlists.
 
chid76 said:
Whats so bad about windows media player? I use itunes for streaming radio, vlc for films and wmp for mp3's etc.
Click to expand...

Nothing at all if it works well for you! My personal choices of Foobar2000 and now J-River Media Center 16 were based on the following reasons:

1) Best playback quality available for my digital files - both Foobar and J-River offer ASIO, WASAPI and Kernel Streaming options. WMP lacks these choices.

2) Support for a wide range of file formats - again both of my choices offer a massive range of codec choices (my main library being in FLAC lossless). WMP is limited to a smaller number of codec, which Microsoft decides.

3) Customisation of the player - I want the player to both work and look as I desire. WMP doesn't have the vast range of options that Foobar and J-River offer me. With these 2 player I can customise the player to suit my own style preferences.

But this is just based on what I want from my music playback software, and is only my individual opinion. If WMP or any other player works best for you there is nothing at all wrong with that.
 
joeyjojo said:
Thread revival? Were you searching for "songbird"?
Click to expand...

Yeah pretty much, trying to extract myself from iTunes but finding all the Windows alternatives to be a bit meh for one reason of another.

I used to use Winamp all the time back in the day and have been trying to use it again recently but the interface just feels old and clunky, plus most of the skins are rubbish or don't seem to work properly and the album art import function just gets crap low resolution versions. I've got 30GBs worth of albums to update and I don't want them all looking pony.

I tried out Songbird and was thinking yep I've found my alternative to iTunes but it's rubbish at handling compilations (as is Winamp) and looking on the forum they have posts from 3 years ago relating to this and still not implemented, they've sodded around adding Facebook integration and rubbish like that rather than fix basic functionality. The Android app ain't too bad but quite often the widget stops working and won't open Songbird when you click on it or you'll get a song going in the app and when you return to the screen with the widget it hasn't updated with the currently playing track so the pause and skip buttons don't work either, at least on my SGS2 that has been my experience.

Might give Foobar a go but not holding out too much hope, am thinking to just say screw it and go back to iTunes but then the music I copy to my SGS2 doesn't have artwork or have the correct track/artist info...

Any other suggestions would be most welcome.
 
Give MediaMonkey a try. I tried all of the above players, including Foobar, but MediaMonkey seems better provided you give it a clean skin (by default it looks horrible). Very easy to change the tags and find album art too.
 
FlyingPig said:
Give MediaMonkey a try. I tried all of the above players, including Foobar, but MediaMonkey seems better provided you give it a clean skin (by default it looks horrible). Very easy to change the tags and find album art too.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that but I did look at MediaMonkey but it doesn't keep the library organised unless you pay for the gold version which is a shame.
 
I miss foobar so so much on OSX. Clementine is the closest alternative. I would run it through wine if I could make global shortcuts work somehow. Honest to god nothing better than fb2k.
 
Hxc said:
I miss foobar so so much on OSX... I would run it through wine if I could make global shortcuts work somehow. Honest to god nothing better than fb2k.
Click to expand...

I have the same problem with Linux, considering I'm always playing music I've found very little in player terms and nothing that compares to Foobar. If you ever figure out how to get it working with Wine then you'll have to post back.

fozzybear said:
I've tried Foobar but there's a lack of decent tutorials to get things looking good.
Click to expand...

Trial and error mostly, just got to find a skin you like and play around with it from there... although I'm inclined to say why does it need to look good? For something I'm not going to be looking at I'd prefer functionality over form and while it's a bit clunky at first, after adding the Columns UI it's by far the best player for me.

Something to bear in mind is that certain players are geared towards one style of user or another. Foobar is very much a playlist oriented player which is where people get scared.
 
Auraomega said:
Something to bear in mind is that certain players are geared towards one style of user or another. Foobar is very much a playlist oriented player which is where people get scared.
Click to expand...

Good to know as I rarely use them, will give foobar a try though.

Besides the columns UI what else should I get?
 
When I say playlist oriented I don't mean M3Us, more you create the playlist at the side as you go along rather than just playing an album at a time. Normally though I just grab my entire collection and switch to 'Shuffle (tracks)', with Columns UI though you can just as easily select a single album to play.

One thing that Foobar has which every other play seems to miss is complete replay gain support; it can scan, tag and use replay gain from all file formats that support it rather than needing various tools and it auto scans and tags both individual tracks and as albums via the album tags - win!

Depends on what you want out of Foobar, my components are Columns UI, a scrobbler and the ABX plugin.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom