Music/Media Players- what should I use?

For years I have been running Winamp as my main media player, for everything from music to videos. As I have recently upgraded to a Lenovo T61 running Windows 7, I have been wondering if I should just use Winamp or if I should use a different (or better) music player. But does anyone else here have any better ideas?

Songbird

VLC is a workhorse that will never let you down.

Bank said:

VLC is a workhorse that will never let you down.

Who doesn't use VLC these days?

Winamp is fine, I think. I dunno what exactly is better. Deliplayer is cool for music

VLC glitches for me (stutters video, audio is fine), but I use it so infrequently I never messed with the settings to get it to work. Might just be my poor 3yo laptop can't cut it these days -.-

Depends really on how flexible you want it. If you're not focused on building a media library, VLC is a good option. If you want a dedicated music player but don't care about customisation I recommend iTunes, or if you want extreme customisation go with Foobar2000. Some of the things people do with Foobar are quite impressive - check out their forums.

Prince of Darkness said:

Who doesn't use VLC these days?

Me. I use Windows Media Player.

VLC, as said above, plays everything.

EDIT: Yeah, Foobar is the shit as well.

Winamp for music, VLC for videos. Why would you want to use anything else? WMP sucks donkey balls in my opinion.

durisnonfrangor said:

if you want extreme customisation go with Foobar2000.

I use Foobar2K with virtually no customizations. I like that it doesn't have any skins by default and actually looks like a *gasp* normal Windows program.

Winamp for music

Windows Media Player Classic for videos

Yeah, I use Winamp for everything. I might consider a different media player if I didn't have an iPod, but I refuse to use iTunes and Winamp is the only media player I know of that has a decent plugin for syncing stuff to an iPod.

Ralphis said:

Winamp for music

Windows Media Player Classic for videos

This, with the addition of Foobar2000 at university because it can play internet radio streams and doesn't require installing. I never saw a point in not using Winamp: It works for me, always did, so why move away? And Media Player Classic plays almost all videos I've ever tried flawlessly, only exceptions being some rare old mkvs with multiple subtitle and audio tracks for which I had to use VLC to make them work (but I dislike using VLC in general so that's all I use it for).

For DVDs I mostly use MPC too, but I have some DVDs around which' menus crash MPC and VLC, work in WMP but without subs and work flawlessly only in PowerDVD and such. :P

Until the KDE team gets their act together with Amarok on Windows (lol), I'd say go with VLC. The few times I listen to music on Windows I stick with it. For video I use that or mplayer from the command line.

I also enjoyed using Aqualung for music, so you may want to check that out.

iPod means apple got me using iTunes :-(... along with VLC for video.

I used to use FB2k, that is a great program

ITunes for music, VLC for video.

ITunes kinda blows though.

eargosedown said:

ITunes for music, VLC for video.

ITunes kinda blows though.

What she said.

XMPlay or Foobar2000.

I exclusively use MediaMonkey for all of my music listening needs. It's awesome.

Prince of Darkness said:

Who doesn't use VLC these days?

Those that use Media Player Classic.

What I like about it:

• Single-file
  
• Portable
  
• Doesn't need proprietary codecs
  
• Comes as part of the CCCP and K-Codec pack, so when setting something from scratch, it's really (almost) all you'll ever need.
  
• Has all the options I ever needed, without all the clutter
  
• In practice, it performed better/was more compatible than "more capable" players.
  
• Integrates with SWF (Flash) files smoothly, too, a plus if you have plenty of those and lets you even control the timeline.
  
• Doesn't have the bullshit adware/nag screens of other players.
  

Then again, I still use Winamp for music because:

• Far superior/easier to use playlist system compared to anything I've seen
  
• Good selection of plugins for formats such as MOD/S3M and even Adlib/YM-3-8912/SID etc. without cluttering up my workspace with a dozen dedicated players
  

Then again, it's pretty mediocre for videos, that's why I also use MPC.

That being said....as of now I also use hardware media players a lot: I mean those cheapo DVD players that can also play CDs/DVDs full of MP3/Videos/XVid/MPEG4 stuff. They are much more relaxing to use, as you can just plop in front of your TV and are not as expensive as a "media center PC".

MPC is pissing me off lately. I've noticed that it in conjunction with the CCCP has issues syncing the audio for movies in certain cases. VLC works better in my case. It also has issues with the taskbar overlapping the video in fullscreen without a lot of tweaking -- or maybe that's something to do with my dual-screen setup? Bah!

For music I use Winamp and only Winamp. This is because I can find for Winamp a plugin to listen to just about every kind of chiptune known to man and enough DSP crap to compensate for my weird headset. The downside is my DSP plugin doesn't like Windows 7, so I had to do some permissions hacking in the registry to get that right.

iTunes is unreliable junk. When it actually works, half the damn thing is cluttered up trying to be a huge list and a store. It has no plugins and doesn't spend much time trying to be good at playing music.

WMP is another case of something being stuck with store-like functions I don't need. It does at least work well on Windows 7, but I need my plugins for chiptunes.

smplayer is the best program for playing videos on Windows. I would use Winamp 5 for playing my music collection. But rhythmbox or Xmms on Linux. But those on Windows should look into smplayer, it really is good.

This :

Bank said:

VLC is a workhorse that will never let you down.

When I am on Ubuntu I use Rythmbox for the music.

VLC for video
Winamp 2.91 for mp3
Modplug Player for tracked music
Deliplayer2 for Amiga mods
Various format specific players like Sidplay or AYemul for chiptunes

Belial said:

Winamp 2.91 for mp3

Hey I may still have some 1.x branch versions laying around. Want them? :-p

Dunno if it counts, but I used a DOS-based media player called "QV" (Quickview) back in the day. Self-contained, played most formats of the time (early AVI, WAV, VOC) and displayed most pic formats except JPG...later on they made a "Quickview Pro" that added support for MP3, JPEG, MPEG1/MPEG2 videos and even DivX (!) although you needed a pretty beefy system to play anything with MPEG4 (a Pentium 233 MMx stutters a lot on DivX, but MPEG1/MPEG2 at VGA resolution are perfect)

Belial said:

Winamp 2.91 for mp3

I remember that was the last good Winamp

Winamp 2? Why? Winamp 5 can use all the skins and plugins from 2, is more stable, gets regular security patches, and has some sweet features to boot. Yes, Winamp 3 was complete garbage, but 5 is good stuff as long as you don't install the bloatware that comes with the install file.

neubejiita said:

smplayer is the best program for playing videos on Windows. I would use Winamp 5 for playing my music collection. But rhythmbox or Xmms on Linux. But those on Windows should look into smplayer, it really is good.

Heh.SMPlayer is just a frontend to MPlayer. On my old computer, I had to use MPlayer to play videos because it could play DVDs and MPEG-4 (Xvid isn't a format, it is a codec!) in real time (haven't heard about VLC). Frontends would slow it down. Ultimately I understood that lack of GUI is good. ;) And I still use it for everything.

I use SMPlayer for video and Audacious for audio. On Linux. On Windows I don't play media files anymore.