Recommendations for music players?

Hi I've just started using Win 7 again after being a macboy for 4 solid years. Used iTunes a lot, but I don't like it so I'm not going to use it on my new Vaio.

For DJing I will install Virtual Dj which is a very good free mixing application that allows you to drag and drop tracks in one of the two virtual decks, and has a number of very useful basic mixing features. I would thoroughly recommend this application, certainly on the Mac it's been extremely easy to pick up and use and haven't encountered any bugs.

But that is not so good for playing albums, so was wondering if anyone knew any decent third party applications that can handle this, preferably by dragging and dropping from file manager... *aherm* 'scuse my friench I meant windows explorer.

I used firebird on mac as it's good for playing FLAC (something that iTunes has yet to get to grips with... ) but it ended up being a pain in the ass, asking me to log in to last.fm and stuff all the time, so I'm ideally looking for something a bit slicker than that.

If anyone says windows media player I'm going to boil my head in syrup.

Cheers will give winamp a shot, any others?

I was using the version of VDJ designed for 13" screens, but now I've got a bigger monitor I'm sure I can find space for another couple of decks

STU9000 said:

If anyone says windows media player I'm going to boil my head in syrup.

If you have a large music file collection (including FLAC), and are looking for very good ALTERNATIVES to Windows Media Player that actually do support FLAC, certainly Winamp is a fine suggestion as has already been mentioned. It's basic functionality is superb, and everybody seems to have settled on their own particular "skin" of choice from the seemingly infinite collection out there.

But most significantly, Winamp is a super-fine music player (that certainly plays FLAC) with lots of functionality... not the least of which is the song-specific EQ ("with a memory, by song title") so that you can have a particular uniquely remembered 10-band EQ setup for each and every song in your collection (or use a common "default" if you don't need a unique EQ preset for a song). Anytime you play that song the remembered EQ preset will be loaded. So every song sounds great... exactly as you want it to when you adjust the EQ during playback (and "save" that as a by-name preset).

I also use a "visualization plug-in" named G-Force Platinum with Winamp, so that I can "watch my music" as well as listen to it with Winamp.




Or, I also highly recommend Jaangle, which is also a terrific music player but is also a terrific "collection organizer", "playlist creator" (for M3U playlist files), etc. Plays all kinds of music (including FLAC), and video for that matter although I only use it for music.

It also has a wonderful highly-customizable (and skinnable) user-interface, automatically retrieves artist bios, photos, record album reviews and tracklists, etc. I have my own collection of high-quality 500x500 album art, and Jaangle utilizes that collection in its album displays.

It is superb for managing and playing from large music collections.

Winamp sounds the tits, like the idea of song specific EQ settings! iTunes still doesn't offer that, I think. Who cares anyway. Namp!

STU9000 said:

... like the idea of song specific EQ settings!

Yes, this really is a long sought-after and terrific feature. Automated EQ-memory by song.

Don't forget to also try G-Force Platinum. You can't imagine how much "fun" it adds to your music listening, to be able to "see" the music with a visualization that reflects tempo, volume, mood, rhythm, frequency, etc.

If you do install G-Force Platinum I can provide my own "customization" (doesn't everybody always think that their own settings are best???) which produces what I feel is a "livelier and more responsive" visualization result.

There are many parameters available with G-Force that control the durations of various "forces" that operate simultaneously on the visualization, resulting in essentially a random never-duplicated image that is in constant flux (controlled primarily by the mathematical notion of the music itself).

So by altering these additional parameters that control the "forces" you can significantly influence what you see on the screen, how long each "force" persists before a different one comes into play, the duration of each general situation before morphing into something else, etc..

You may very likely go "full screen" for G-Force, for parties. Just let Winamp play, and let the screen show G-Force.

I've been playing with Songbird these past few days and I wouldn't recommend it.

As a metadata editor, I thought it was a godsend! I had spent an hour quickly altering the genre metadata in the library yesterday. Today, I opened up my AIMP and the genre metadata had not changed at all.

As a web broswer, it uses Firefox. My concern is security. Does it keep up with the rapid Firefox changes? Does it come up with security plugs as Firefox does? And it doesn't even look for or recognize the existing Firefox profile and its add-on's.

As a player, it does not normalize. Different albums are played at different volumes. To have to manually adjust per album is absolutely unacceptable.

Get Artwork? It scans my library every time I click it. And it never accessed the internet via this function to get artwork.