Windows 7 - Freeware audio players

Has anyone had the pleasure of trying Atomic Player and i mean the free version,i think it has very good sound,foobar on the other hand is not anything special and maybe it is because i can not get the dsp plugins installed proberly,anyway i can not hear any difference on my system and when you are used to winamp you expect drastic audio enhancement.
Now i use only wmp 12 and the new Aimp 3 witch i believe is a step ahead in audio quality
Kind Regards Asser

I've never tried Atomic Power, but I have tried Foobar, Winamp, I-Tunes, and Media Monkey.

I can't tell the difference between them with default settings, not using an equalizer or any type of DSP enhancements.

I suspect your sound quality is mostly due to the quality of your source material and your playback hardware: speakers, amplifier, and headphones.

Hi there
don't forget probably the best FREE VIDEO (and audio) player around -- even plays decrypted commercial DVD's LEGALLY - VLC from videolan.

(Note for DVD the built in decoder libdvdcss doesn't even need the region to be set either.

This is an open source and currently LEGAL facility -- at least in Europe, Ru Federation, and Oceania. Not sure about the rest but I'm sure it's OK as well).


http://www.videolan.org/

http://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html


Adjust the audio in Audio effects if you really need to mess about with a lot of equalisation.

In general if you have your music recorded at a decent compression level (at least 128 kps if you are using mp3) - or preferably no compression at all-- I use FLAC as it compresses to about HALF - 60 % the size of WAV and is NOT compressed so music is of the highest quality - you won't need to twiddle around with the audio settings --especially if you are using a decent set of cans.

Those White ear bud phones where the long suffering public hears more music than the wearer does together with hideously compressed music (64 kps etc) won't improve the sound quality whatever equalisation you have -- and in fact any adjustment will be worse since the artifacts will become even more audible.

Cheers
jimbo

Hi jimbo i have got a 300gb flac collection how do i add my expantion drive and the files there

I mean in VLC sorry

Hi there
just open VLC with ==>PLAY>>FOLDER where the folder is a music directory on of your HDD. I'm on a work computer at the moment so I can't check whethe its play FOLDER or DIRECTORY but the meaning should be clear.

(If you play DISC the whole disc will be played --OK for DVD's however).

I should store the flac files in some sort of Album / play list type of sequence then it's easy to play them.
There's loads of free programs as well for tagging flac files - although I created mine by using WINAMP to rip from CD's.

cheers
jimbo

If you're looking for a free music management/player program I recommend Jaangle.

It plays all kinds of music files (and video too, but I'd go with VLC for video), but mostly it's the overall user interface of Jaangle which is so terrific. If you like album art, artist bio's, album reviews and track lists, 10 different organizational presentation sort sequences, umpteen different styles of how things look, simple and advanced search to finding things to put into a playlist, M3U playlist creation, use of the built-in music player (and 3-band EQ) or linking to an external player (e.g. Winamp) using the Jaangle playlist, etc., etc., give Jaangle a try.

I like the Massif "skin" but it's the music collection functionality that is what I'm raving about. I also use VLC and Winamp, so I'm not putting them down. But for music search/play and general appearance enjoyment when playing music... try Jaangle.

although i've never used this, you may want to take a peek at this> XBMC
it's got pretty fantastic reviews.