well then.. new question... what music player has the best SOUND QUALITY... i dont need to convert aac to anything or do anything like that... i just want to listen to music while i draw...
Though there have been some discussions about varying quality of sound throughout different media players, this is all irrelevant. An average music lover rips their CDs to a mid-bitrate MP3 which is playable anywhere, anytime.
The sound quality depends solely on the quality of the file itself, not the way its decoded and reproduced or streamed. I only mentioned XMplay as a bad choice because it uses BASS audio libraries, so if your music already is in AAC (yes, I agree you don't have to convert anything to listen to it), you'll simply have a bad experience.
From my own personal knowledge of MP3 and its encoders and decoders, I would suggest foobar2000 if you can appreciate its primitive, god-awful look. There are tons of skins for the player you can find on
deviantART though chances are that if you're looking for eye candy, you won't find anything that suits you... Not to mention that skins can be a b***h to set up just the way you want them to; you may have to dive into coding through tutorials and crap, which just takes the fun out of simple and easy music reproduction.
So, give
MusicBee a try. The player looks rather good on its own accord and can be easily customizable. If you wish, download it and install it, then go to the
help page, expand all the questions and follow any and all instructions over there. That is where you'll be downloading the encoders you may wish to use in the future. But again, like I said, if you have music in AAC instead of MP3, avoid this player.
On the other hand, if you have music in many different codecs (like MP3, AAC, OGG, WMA, FLAC, APE etc.) you can either try Winamp or MediaMonkey.
Personally, MediaMonkey is ugly as hell and just looks and feels complicated from the first time you start it up, while installing Winamp means a lot of unnecessary bloat for simple music reproduction, so if you go with that, be sure to choose a custom install and uncheck any services you don't use (shoutcast and stuff).
Of course, the easiest player to use is iTunes, but it can take a lot of RAM if you don't know how and which services to tweak or turn off to make it more efficient.
