what music player do you use?

[garbanzo]

i'm on a seemingly endless search for the 'perfect' music player, but i have yet to find it. i find fatal flaws with every app i use, and it's incredibly frustrating

i want a player with album art support (folder.jpg), a native interface (no skins), and a great library organizer, preferably with a navigation tree for sorting. is that too much to ask?

so far, my faves are MediaMonkey and Songbird. if only i could combine the two!

i've also tried:

WMP: good integration, but very very slow, lacking in features
iTunes: beautiful, great features, but only works with embedded album art
WinAmp: lots of features, but absolutely terrible library
foobar2000: infinitely customizable, but its playlist-centric ways irk me
MusikCube: fast and minimal, native interface, but no album art support
AIMP2: better than winamp, but still, terrible library support
AlbumPlayer: looks good, but expensive, and not too good at organizing
MediaMonkey: GREAT library support, but very slow startup, and very ugly
Songbird: very good overall, but doesn't work with CD Art Display, which is my favourite freeware app.

i won't list the innumerable music players that lack library support like 1by1, Billy, and more. also media players like MPC and VLC. they're just no good for huge music libraries.

so what have i missed? i know the perfect player is out there. what do you use?

 

[Barman58]

Hi garbanzo,

I actually tend to use VLC to play everything but use Mediamonkey to catalogue and organise my content and create playlists. It also syncs to my phone without issue so it wins there too. and the skins on version 3 make it , a little, less ugly

 

[garbanzo]

thanks for the input Barman. i do like MediaMonkey for organizing, but i have never gotten in the habit of making playlists. maybe that's something i should consider, then i can just use MPC or Billy to play them.

i do really like album art though

as for MediaMonkey skins, i find them to be very ugly. i run the unskinned mode when i use it, it blends in much better with windows. i never like using apps that use their own window frames and buttons and everything...

 

[Barman58]

Hi,

what I like with the gold version of MM is the automated playlist generation where you can add things such as not heard for a certain time to all the rest of the parameters - then download to phone and hear stuff I'd forgotten I had .

and yes the album art features are great.

BTW I run in non skinned mode most of the time too

 

[smarteyeball]

I've settled on Foobar myself. I don't listen to 85% of the stuff I have anyway, so a library isn't really all that important to me. I just create a playlist for the stuff I listen to regularly and add other stuff as needed.

I would like better visualization options though...

 

[Mark]

JetAudio (COWON Media Center) is a great free program with the option to pay for a pro version although the free one is great, it has a supper fast media search and can also play video and edit tags and album art.

 

[96accord]

Windows Media Player. Works fine for me.

 

[skunksmash]

WMP or MPC usually...... i've only got my rig setup for ''stereo'' & they handle that perfectly...





SK

 

[swarfega]

Mainly using WMP atm. I want to get the full MS experience while Win7 is in beta to make sure everything works ok.

 

[XxKOLOHExX]

iTunes love it so much that i got an ipod cause of it
Go figure

 

[anykey]

so far, my faves are MediaMonkey and Songbird. if only i could combine the two!

For me it's MediaMonkey3 Gold without a doubt.
There are a number of skins and after a diligent search I found something nearly suitable for my requirements. I contacted the author and they tweaked it to my liking. MM3 wins every time

 

[Oldarney]

@Garbanzo
"WMP: good integration, but very very slow, lacking in features"

In what way is wmp slow? its extremely fast on my side of things, takes on average about three seconds to launch and uses very little memory compared to song bird.

I use song bird and wmp almost always. Song bird is still missing too many things to switch over to it completely, a now playing list for example. I have iTunes sandboxed and put away from my system, it keeps 3 background processes running at all times. Its not skinnable and imo, its fugly. I use iTunes when i have to play specially encoded (dual layer) mov's. iTunes is the main reason I've dumped ipod's.

As far as buying music goes, ive got my means of getting every song i could ever want in V0 to 5.1 96khz/24bit lossless format.

 

[garbanzo]

WMP simply can't handle my library. it's not too huge - around 350 full albums. but i use high-res album art, mostly 800x800 or bigger. WMP loads quick enough, but it doesn't seem to cache thumbnails of my folder.jpg images, but instead loads them every time i use it. scrolling through the cover browsers or any other view where the art is shown just takes forever as i wait for covers to slowly blink into place. all other media players i use handle my album art just fine.

i've actually gone back to foobar since i started this thread. it had been half a year since i tried it, and they have made some big changes to the default setup since then, including changing the way the program handles your music library. in the end, they ended all the frustrations i faced with playlist handling. plus, the default ui is now much better, so i don't have to bother with columns or panels in order to get a good config. plus, it's much, much faster than media monkey...

 

[Oldarney]

No wonder. my situation is quite different, i do not ever look at my albums view, and few of my songs have covers. I'd say 30% of my songs have covers. In that respect Songbird is awesome, by using the last fm cover finder it loads covers from the internet.

I should really check out foobar, I've heard nothing but good reviews on it.

 

[mansrm81]

I use WMP and VLC player but mostly WMP

 

[Oldarney]

You use VLC for music????

i love vlc for video but, its music organizing capabilities stink. it simply wasn't mant as a serious music player/organizer.

 

[sevsman]

I use winamp and it's great for me. I used to use Musixmatch jukebox but i gave up with that years ago.
I also use VLC for videos, but music? How do you Que songs up and what do you do for a library?

 

[jbosa1]

I use Mediamonkey, mostly because it has the best way of dealing with lagre music collections...I also use iTunes beacuse I have an iPod but iTunes is a bit slow in Windows...I don't know how it behaves in a Mac but I guess it is written for OS X and that thing is quite obvious in Windows...I like iTunes but it's too slow and does strange things to a Windows user...but iPod...never will listen to anything else! I love my iPod...I will do anything for it, even go to bed with iTunes!

But as a fact, Mediamonkey is my favorite...it used to be Winamp but as the music collection grows Mediamonkey is better...

 

[anykey]

I use Mediamonkey, mostly because it has the best way of dealing with lagre music collections.... as a fact, Mediamonkey is my favorite.... as the music collection grows Mediamonkey is better...

I have to agree with you jbosa1, MM is the favourite esp with large music collections.

 

[jbosa1]

yepp, MediaMonkey is cool...iTunes is a very strange thing really but I like the link to Apple store...just the other day I went there to buy a speciall song...A-Camps "I can buy you" and that went very well, they ripped off my creditcard and I got the song, everybody happy!