What is your favorite media player ?

VLC is nice and clean. HellBlazer introduced me to Foobar2000 when I wanted to start scrobbling and i haven't looked back, though.

I've pretty much only used Windows Media Player, but I've been meaning to switch to Winamp for a while now.

Watch out, superior GNU/Linux user coming in.

Jokes aside, I use gmusicbrowser because it's very customizable once you figure it out (layouts can be modified with just plain text) and it handles larger libraries quite well. I just wish it was QT instead of GTK, but it's not a big deal.

I just use Windows Media Player. It's not that bad, only downsides for me are that if you have it to order chronologically by default it can only do it from newest to oldest, so if I want to listen to a band chronologically I have to add each album from bottom to top individually; and on Windows 7 it only shows album art in the "visualisations" window as 200x200 for some dumb reason. I looked into whether this was possible to change too and it doesn't look like Microsoft care much, but one should probably not expect much from them.

But anyway. It works just fine. Even if you have to use a bit of imagination. Like I've used the "parental rating" field to put in the bands nationalities so I can view them by that too.

I strictly use itunes for downloaded music though I never purchase anything from the itunes store.

I really despise Itunes at this point. mainly due to it being slow and taking forever to load. but i've yet to find another media player that allows me to organize music they way itunes allows.

my main complaint about itunes is there's no way to change the skin. it's this giant white box staring at me in the face. a nighttime it gets incredibly bothersome and attracts insects.

haha, you're right, it's indeed a recurring side effect, lol! But then again, you can hide the player in the background....

I used to use WMP a lot, because you don't need to 'load' your entire music collection into the player... Just drag and drop. But the problem is that the media library looks kinda messy to me. So I switched to Itunes (at first I thought it was no way to get around the issue where you were forced to load your music into the itunes library, but I eventually found a way around that... so basicly I drag and drop now too in Itunes eventhough I can also easily select the music in the ITunes library, but I guess it's a habit that I can't get rid off (selecting the music on my drive, then dropping it in my current play list, that's all i want... really don't feel like going through the extensive Itunes list to look for an album of a band (scrolling through the libraries also tends to cause a slight lag)

I used to use only WMP the last decade but changed to foobar like 4 years ago and I love it. It's clean, simple, fast and I can customize it all I want the way I want. And it doesn't use up too much CPU.

I use VLC for two simple reasons:

* Its pretty tiny and does not take much effort for my PC to run.

* It has played every media file format I have ever come over.

Its as simple as that really.

i'm pretty pro-winamp, posted a few times fairly enthusiastically on the subject, haha.
these days i use spotify more because it's a streaming service i pay for, but i still use winamp for mp3s

Well, I used to use Winamp back in 2000-ish. Does that count?!

I also used Musicmatch Jukebox for a lot of years, don't know if anyone remembers that one, and up to v.8.0 it was a great music player that could easily handle big libraries. It had this drop-down structure and allowed to easily tag MP3. I loved it, but eventually it was left in the dark in terms of development and codec support, so it turned to shit (blame Yahoo on that one).

Since I always had big loads of MP3, and a newly bought iPod at the time, I started using iTunes. That lasted for a long time, and to be honest I still have my library there updated but I barely use it anymore (my iPod also died, maybe that's why). I mainly use WMP to grab a quick album or two, and mostly listen to what I have in physical format. I hate how bloated iTunes has become, and even more with huge libraries, but I adore how they changed the layout to include album art in the drop-down album menus from v.11 onwards. It's also very good when it comes to organizing, tagging, playlists and all of that. I don't like Foobar2000 very much because it seems way too much Winamp-y. I can't deal with that kind of organization anymore, not when iTunes shows all the cool artwork in my face.

Foobar 2000 rules. It's clean, excellent to organize libraries, playlists and tag editing. The eq is quite useful as well.

I use foobar in combination with the darkone 4.0 skin

http://tedgo.deviantart.com/art/DarkOne-v4-360862076



foobar superior!

I won't put in cause Foobar's abilities, as it seems to be well revered even in audiophile circles, but with that being said isn't it a program that is more audiophile-ish? I mean, a lot of info available on the screen (a lot of technical info for that matter) and a smaller emphasis on the graphic part? I could be mistaken but that's the idea I have of it.

Despite its obvious flaws iTunes does have an attractive visual component.

You can still make Foobar look awesome. This is one of the skins I have on it:



If you want to see more info, the album/artist column can show more; the file/disc icon on bottom left show the playlists, the whole songs by artists and the album view.

That's actually decent looking. I guess it comes down to a matter of customization then.

Winamp with old classic 90s look!

Winamp / Modern / City Night skin = perfect music player since that edition came out. I've been using the player since 1999 and nothing beats it when it comes to daily playing.

I mostly just use VLC. it's simple and does everything I want. Never really cared for a bunch of bells and whistles.

Didn't we already have this thread over at the Tavern?

In any case, I'm not one to forego an opportunity to repeat myself indefinitely, so here goes:
I've used Winamp for more or less as long as I can remember.
I've tried numerous times switching over to Foobar, but it never really stuck with me.
Winamp suits my needs just fine, so switching to something else never really felt necessary.

Foobar all the way for me. Only one thing I don't like about it. If I want to go straight to a band, I can't just type their name in and get them highlighted like you can with iTunes. Instead, it takes me to the song with the closest spelling of what I type in, which is really stupid. The ctrl+F feature also searches all data, so if I put in Death, I'm likely to get a thousand hits because of all the bands, albums, song titles and metadata with the word death in it. It's really stupid and I wish I knew how to change it.

I've been using iTunes all my life, and I'm really confortable with it. Haven't upgraded it since 2012 though.

I got fed up with iTunes several years ago... When I reached around 4.000 individual tracks for some reason iTunes couldn't keep up anymore and became laggy as fuck, taking a shitton of time to load and randomly crashing all the time. Obviously this is a long time ago, but I never bothered going back

Really? I never had lag issues with iTunes, I mean, nothing that really made me angry, a couple of seconds to open, but once that it started it works just fine, and I have like 30k tracks on it. :/

Defragging the "cache" folder, the one that has the artwork cache, helps in making iTunes faster. I remember there were a few buggy versions a few years back though, and those were indeed laggy. Now the program is just bloated, he.

I think the severity of the lag could also be blamed on whether you are using the player on a Windows or Mac platform... But still, even on a mac the program can have some minor lag issues (either when importing files/dropping files into a playlist or just scrolling through the library). But then again the mac I'm using is hardware from 2009/2010 so maybe the recently manufactured mac computers / macbooks have gotten rid of the problem ??? anyone that can confirm this here ???

I've used Winamp for so long (around a decade) that I am set in my ways. I can't really see myself moving to something else, considering. I don't even use library functions, I just drag/drop into the playlist editor.

It certainly beats what I was using before:


The only thing I dislike about it is it's kinda clunky, and it looks fuzzy when you change the window scaling... the "bento" skin is nice and compact, but I can't separate or drag down the playlist editor to be really long, which is the one window I actually want to keep wide open. The "modern" skin or whatever it's called allows me to detach and resize it independently, though, which is nice. (cute wallpaper, right?)

A (cute) SS cat?! Where did you find such a thing?

Winamp...even though they are no more. It still works, just can't tag anything.

Sure:
http://www.metal-archives.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=102359
http://www.metal-archives.com/~metalarc/board/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=78626

You can still tag just fine in winamp, it's just that it won't do it automatically anymore since the programme no longer has access to the Gracenet database, a service which Winamp had to pay a license to use.

OP, topics like yours most definitely do belong in the tavern.

But yes, count me in with the long-time winamp users without any need to change. Granted there are some formats it won't play "out of the box", but a simple plugin download usually fixes the issue, except for some video files. VLC plain works better for serious video watching, anyway. However, winamp is set up just the way I like it for audio and it's always proved extremely reliable and fast. If I ever switched though, it would be for Foobar.

That's what I meant....the auto-tag feature. It's not hard to manually enter the info.

I use the Amazon Cloud Player. Yeah, I know, you guys may think I'm dumb for buying music digitally, but I don't care. I don't have to be holding the CD in my hands. You can import other music in anyways, and it just has a nice interface.

I've moved the thread to the tavern.

I've been using Ubuntu since more than 4 years, I've been alternating between both Clementine and Banshee (currently using this one) as both are good looking (I'm not quite picky anyway) players and they're decent with my Ipod (nothing is perfect except Itunes though, but everything is better than using this piece of shit software.)

Banshee:

I use Windows Media Player and I love it. For burning CDs though, I use iTunes.

It is a commissioned portrait of my newest kitty:

No... it's just a random image I found on the internet... they do look a bit similar, though.

Anyway, though I listen to music with Winamp, I only ever watch videos with VLC. When I started using it, it was the best free and widely compatible out-of-the-box player I knew of, and I don't see myself changing to a new player for video either.

I really dislike WMP for ripping/burning, because it doesn't allow me to rip lossless, and it creates gaps between seamless CD tracks. It also doesn't seem to like to burn seamless split tracks, and it won't let me burn FLAC files... I use dB Poweramp for ripping and CDBurnerXP for burning.

I use EAC when dB can't manage to rip something off a damaged CD or a degraded CD-r, because it seems to be able to do that where dB sometimes cannot.

I've never ventured any further than windows media player because it does everything I need it to and is lightweight enough. Maybe if I discover something less bulky that looks cooler, then I'll consider changing