Alternative to WMP ?

Thanks for your suggestion, I think I'll stick to WMP or get winamp with classic plugin

Thanks! =)

media player classic is great. as light-weight as they come!

Media Player Classic - Homecinema is the ticket. Winamp's GUI just isn't cut out for video playback and I've always found VLC to be lacking when it comes to user controls.

Media Player Classic looks and acts like WMP because it's basically an updated version of one of the old WMP clients. I have had windows 7 installed since the public release of the beta and I've never opened WMP, just use MPC-homecinema.

woah there, don't settle for WMP! there are many players out there that are far superior :)

there are so many options. personally, i swear by foobar2000. it's the most powerful and versatile music player out there. the only problem is it's not an out-of-the-box app, it takes a lot of setup and has a steep learning curve. but if you take the time to learn it, it's amazing.

MediaMonkey is a close second. it's also quite customizable. if you're compulsive about tagging, it's the best app around. i use MM for most of my tagging, and foobar for playing.

AIMP2 is a very lightweight, portable alternative to WinAmp. if you like that style of player (modular, skinned), then definitely try it out. its library support is crap though.

MusikCube is a good one to try. it's got no album art support, but it's wicked fast, and does a very good job managing a large library.

Trout is one of the newer players on the scene (find it over at DonationCoder). it's still under heavy development so it's not perfectly polished, but it's tiny, fast, and very good at what it does.

last but definitely not least is Billy (by Sheep Friends). this wonderful, wonderful app is the slimmest imaginable. it does not even use ID3 tags, but relies on tidy directroy structure and file names to keep things tidy. it has a great setting that lets you open a full directory of tracks by just double-clicking on one, making it super easy to play a single album. plus, if you load your whole library into it, its live search feature lets you simply start to type and the filter is applied as you go. i can literally hit a hotkey to run Billy, then type a word or two to filter 5000 tracks down to the song i want, and hit enter to play - the whole process takes about 2 seconds. imagine your whole music library at your fingertips! i also use billy all the time for trying out newly downloaded music and listening to single tracks. for lightweight, fast music listening, there simply is nothing better than Billy!

Its self contained as far as codecs are concerned like VLC, is resource lean like Media Player Classic and has a bunch of features like WMP. Give it a go...you will like it.

SMPlayer - General Info

Digital Fog.

Ill check SMPlayer, thanks for the suggestions guys =)

I use Media Player Classic - Homecinema for movies etc. Supports mkv and embedded subtitles, is lightweight and fast.

For small lightweight player that plays nearly every codec in the known (and probably the unknown as well) universe try VLC from Videolan -- Free -- has built in libdvdcss for playing encrypted commercial DVD's and excellent for sound codecs. Note no HD Video / Blu Ray yet but coming. Very small , fast and installs on Linux as well as windows.

VideoLAN - Free and Open Source software and video streaming solutions for every OS!

For audio commercial offerings are's winamp or mediamonkey. IMO these are far better choices IMO.

Another problem with WMP is that content (especially in W7 Betas - and that includes latest leaked builds 7022, 7048 etc) is sent to microsoft "allegedly only for Statistical purposes so we can see what type of media people play and can improve the product".

If you believe all that then you probably also believe the moon is made of Green Cheese and are a fully paid up member of "The Flat Earth" society.

Note I'm only considering WMP. The actual Media center itself does a passable (but still hobbled) job for viewing TV cards etc.

Windows Media Center = XBOX Media Center