what sound player do you use?

[Trippledence]

Ive been using WMP for ages, got Win Amp the other. And its just as disapointing as when i tried it ages ago. Stick with WMP, its deals with your media libary so much better than win amp, and when you have alot of music tahts way more important than or a 2 meg's of ram.

[rc55]

I can't believe no one's made a decent case for foobar2000!

It's basically a player that on first use looks like Notepad, but underneath it's highly sophisticated, customisable and extendible - it's focus is on performance, quality, simplicity and flexibility and it acheives that all very well.

It was written by Peter Powlowski who used to work for Nullsoft - he initially created some of the plugins that were bundled with a lot of Winamp revisions and a lot of his code is still in use.

It's written in C++, supports pretty much every non-DRM encumbered audio format and can support conversion where encoders are available, its freeDB plugin is awesome for updating tagging information on files that may have been tagged badly, plus if you don't even have tags OR filenames (like 01.mp3, 02.mp3 etc) you can query those online and it usually gets it right by the track lengths (MassTagger also renames files to your specific structure too!).

It also has ReplayGain support which non-destructively creates a tag to tell foobar2000 how loud the song is so once you've tagged your collection you don't have to reach for the volume knob each time your track changes and you happen to have a very loud track.

There's also high quality resampling which for the high level enthusiast helps as it uses the latest proven techniques to match the input signal's sampling frequency with the output hardware.

You of course can also rip and burn as you wish (although the only proven secure cd audio extraction program is exact audio copy), customise the interface and presentation very significantly - just google for 'foobar screenshot', even write your own replacement interface using C++ - and the same goes for audio I/O as a lot of plugins are open source.

Having watched the development of this for a long time the effort is immense, for some time there was an obsession with getting the speed of the player as fast as possible on all platforms and it's certainly paid off.

It's not the most friendly at first but if you persevere you'll benefit.

http://www.foobar2000.org/

Ruairi

[Xaneden]

For a tech forum with a reasonably large Mac and Linux gathering, I am personally surprised not to see more mentions of VLC (VideoLAN Client). Its a great program which, although a tad buggy at times, supports every format I have ever thrown at it. It can be customized greatly, with a host of extremely advanced settings; plus it also looks good, with full skinning abilities.

Its other big feature is that it can, as the name suggests, stream music over networks.

Check it out here at www.videolan.org. It is available for most major OSes, including Windows, Mac OS X, Fedora, Mandrake, Debian; as well as for WIndows CE and PocketPC. It is also available for a number of other Linux builds, but not in precompiled binaries.

(Oh, and its totally open source! )

[muddyfox470]

WMP i dont like itunes at all, winamp just doesnt suit me, altho i have been known to use real player for a bit,

but i always use windows media player i guess it was microsoft gently making it have more features, and ones that i could easily find and use, that made me stick to them without going to any of the others, it is just habit i guess

ian

[Dougal]

oh? whats the plugin then?

http://www.winamp.com/plugins/browse...uery=messenger

I use the 5th one down, by "cunhaw cunhaw"

[directhex]

For a tech forum with a reasonably large Mac and Linux gathering, I am personally surprised not to see more mentions of VLC (VideoLAN Client). Its a great program which, although a tad buggy at times, supports every format I have ever thrown at it. It can be customized greatly, with a host of extremely advanced settings; plus it also looks good, with full skinning abilities.

Its other big feature is that it can, as the name suggests, stream music over networks.

Check it out here at www.videolan.org. It is available for most major OSes, including Windows, Mac OS X, Fedora, Mandrake, Debian; as well as for WIndows CE and PocketPC. It is also available for a number of other Linux builds, but not in precompiled binaries.

(Oh, and its totally open source! )

i'm not entirely sure VLC is comparable, as a player for a music collection. single video files, then sure, but it has little to no value for a music collection - that's more the territory for amaroK or Rhythmbox

[Xaneden]

Well to be fair, it is early days for VLC, its not even at 1.0 yet.

I'm sure in the future it will be geared for music much more strongly than it is now

[Dougal]

The main thing with VLc is that I use it for what it was originally designed for, watching and playing LAN videos.

Its not really a music player, no media library on my version.

Great for single stuff, but not for everyday useage.

[Spud1]

iTunes ofc WMP is just horrible as you know, Winamp..well that was good 5 years ago but it can;t compete now, the UI just isn't as nice as iTunes imho

[Tobeman]

I can't believe no one's made a decent case for foobar2000!

It's basically a player that on first use looks like Notepad, but underneath it's highly sophisticated, customisable and extendible - it's focus is on performance, quality, simplicity and flexibility and it acheives that all very well.

It was written by Peter Powlowski who used to work for Nullsoft - he initially created some of the plugins that were bundled with a lot of Winamp revisions and a lot of his code is still in use.

It's written in C++, supports pretty much every non-DRM encumbered audio format and can support conversion where encoders are available, its freeDB plugin is awesome for updating tagging information on files that may have been tagged badly, plus if you don't even have tags OR filenames (like 01.mp3, 02.mp3 etc) you can query those online and it usually gets it right by the track lengths (MassTagger also renames files to your specific structure too!).

It also has ReplayGain support which non-destructively creates a tag to tell foobar2000 how loud the song is so once you've tagged your collection you don't have to reach for the volume knob each time your track changes and you happen to have a very loud track.

There's also high quality resampling which for the high level enthusiast helps as it uses the latest proven techniques to match the input signal's sampling frequency with the output hardware.

You of course can also rip and burn as you wish (although the only proven secure cd audio extraction program is exact audio copy), customise the interface and presentation very significantly - just google for 'foobar screenshot', even write your own replacement interface using C++ - and the same goes for audio I/O as a lot of plugins are open source.

Having watched the development of this for a long time the effort is immense, for some time there was an obsession with getting the speed of the player as fast as possible on all platforms and it's certainly paid off.

It's not the most friendly at first but if you persevere you'll benefit.

http://www.foobar2000.org/

Ruairi

I was just reading through this thread and was thinking exactly the same thing! I'm glad you wrote all that because you saved me a job There are some amazing foobar2000 UI's that have been made, I just wish I had the time and patience to make one myself

[këö¬t]

iTunes on OS X (so I can stream the music to my Airport Express),
foobar2000 on Windows, and
XMMS on Debian.