Music/Media Players- what should I use?

Maes said:

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)

I remember that, used it to play FLI files. For pics I used Sea.

Some time ago I installed Winamp 5.572 Lite and it crashed with almost every one of my chiptune plugins, most notably Sidamp, so fuck that.

Security patches? As far as my Winamp is concerned I don't have an Internet connection. Sweet features? Didn't notice anything useful.

To answer the OP though, if ALL you want is play MP3 music without any DRM and shit, then Winamp it's perfect. I consider it pretty much the "reference player".

It's also OK if you stick mainly to music and want other formats such as MODs, chiptunes etc. in one player, and as Belial said you can stick to an older version if you don't like the relative bloat in newer ones, and shut off all net connectivity shit.

However it declines sharply for video. In that case, also use something else. It pretty much boils down to how much bloat/adware/loading times you are willing to put up with (me: none).

I use Winamp for music since I like the way it handles playlists.

Video is trickier. Like everyone else I pretty much just use MPC and VLC. I have to keep FLV Player around for the occasional flash video that won't work in either. Also like Jodwin said some DVDs will fail in both, so I have to use the awful PowerDVD.

For Flash, if you try hard enough you can find a download of a standalone Flash player from Adobe that works with pretty much everything. Only minus is that it doesn't have a timeline, but it's perfect for those Flash vids/apps that require interaction (or those which you don't need timeline for).

All I need it for is video, and having the ability to seek is pretty damn important. Plus I'm not too thrilled about using another Adobe application considering they can't even make a decent PDF viewer.

I use Foobar/GOMplayer. VLC as a backup to GOMplayer.

Foobar is THE shit. Unless you are an absolute moron who needs something like iTunes to help you figure out how to play a directory full of music, I will not recommend any other program for playing music.

Aliotroph? said:

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.

Why? Because Winamp 2.91 was pretty much the best version. Winamp 3 was sloooooow and Winamp 5 offered no reason to upgrade except it used more resources and crashed more.

Mind you, this was five years ago when I still used WA so it's probably better now.

I'm using Foobar these days. Winamp became an annoying piece of bugware after they went commercial. I'm missing a few features I had back in Winamp, but on the other hand I haven't yet checked out any of the myriad of plugins for Foobar.

I use WMP for all my videos. It's pretty awesome these days.

iTunes is a piece of crap and I only use it for putting songs onto my iPod.

I use Windows Media Player for music and Winamp for videos. I don't have a problem with either one.

The KMPlayer for pretty much everything. Does anyone here know it?

Danarchy didn't say:
iTunes is a piece of crap and I only use it for putting songs onto my iPod, which is also crap by extension since you can't just copy files on it like every cheapo chinese "cigar" MP3s can.

FTFY.

foobar and global hotkeys. Music just comes out of the speakers, all I ever wanted.

Maes said:

FTFY.

Yeah...though apparently you can install apps on there to make them do that. The iPod Classic was the only thing I could find with a HD big enough for my music collection. Plus, pretty much everyone I know has a stereo with an iPod port on it.

I use Rhythmbox for my music library, Audacious for random songs not part of my library, Xine for DVDs and most videos, VLC for everything else. I also use Linux, so apart from VLC, this has absolutely no use to you.

XMMS when I click click with the mouse, sometimes bplay or ogg123 in the console.

Maes said:

which is also crap by extension since you can't just copy files on it like every cheapo chinese "cigar" MP3s can.

Wait, what? Maybe not out of the box, but you only need to format it manually (ie. in Disk Utility) and you're free to copy files adlib.

Danarchy said:

iTunes is a piece of crap and I only use it for putting songs onto my iPod.

There's a foobar2000 plugin for that :P

Also foobar2000 > all. At least, if you're like me and have a massive music library.

Bank said:

VLC is a workhorse that will never let you down.

Seconded.

durisnonfrangor said:

Wait, what? Maybe not out of the box, but you only need to format it manually (ie. in Disk Utility) and you're free to copy files adlib.

I remember it somehow scrambles filenames when you copy shit on it via iTunes and needs to have a list of all "iTunes approved" files you copied on it, as it won't read just any file you copy randomly on it. At least I never heard that you can do that.

The filename problem can be worked around by copying your songs to your iTunes music folder and keeping it "organized". The program will then name your files according to their tags.

To just "copy files and go" you need alternative firmware. Or do one better and use wifi sync. Chinese players can't do that, lol

Mr. T said:

To just "copy files and go" you need alternative firmware. Or do one better and use wifi sync. Chinese players can't do that, lol

No, but they can copy files like any flash drive and play them afterwards without all that bullshit. iPod can't do that, lol.

They also generally sound like crap, from my experience. Not that I have anything against them, you get what you pay for.

Mr. T said:

They also generally sound like crap, from my experience. Not that I have anything against them, you get what you pay for.

Well, I've owned several of them, and while they do not all sound equally well (one even had a flawed and noisy amp and sounded worse than a cassette walkman) they pretty much all use the same standard commercial grade DACs and u-Amps like those you'd find in any Discman, sound card, Hi-Fi etc. and what makes a major difference are usually the headphones and the default EQ settings (sometimes you have to fiddle around to find a setting that really sounds "neutral" on most headphones).

Some "ship" with the infamous "bucketsound" chinese earphones (in practice, they are telephone-grade earbuds recycled as music headphones. Even the wiring is telephone-grade on those!). I just toss them and use my own hi-fi headphones. That being said, some had superb earbud-type headphone, with the only catch being that the cable doesn't last long. Again, I prefer using my own.

But to make a long story short, the iPod is pretty much the quintessence of all the thing that I DON'T want in a music player (the fact that it's made by Apple is also a big negative, but not strictly related to music, it just translates to the typical Apple suckiness, vendor lock-in and low performance/price ratio).

My cheapo $10 Apollo 1 GB sounds fine with my Sennheisers, as did my cheapo Watson CD/MP3 discman.

Not that I expect or want uber high quality when I go out in the first place. People willing to pay lots of money to listen to their lossy compressed music on a portable player need their heads checked.

As do people that think that in the age of mass-produced digital electronics, there can really be a difference in digital devices playing an audio file. But, wishful thinking -and a lighter waller- can do "miracles".

Maes said:

As do people that think that in the age of mass-produced digital electronics, there can really be a difference in digital devices playing an audio file. But, wishful thinking -and a lighter waller- can do "miracles".

The actual file is the same, but the components actually used for output can make a difference (DUH). My $20 MP3 sounded markedly different (worse, some kind of line noise or whatever) than my $200 iPhone, confirmed with my pro audio technica headphones. But that's the difference $180 makes *shrug*

So that means that a $20 item WITHOUT line out noise fucks the $200 item in the ass at least once, right?

My point was, we're not debating obviously broken devices (I already mentioned having one noise-plagued MP3 which also had several other problems and was eventually retired from the market). But if you pit an iPod vs pretty much any other properly made MP3...it just gets raped in the rectal asshole if you take out all the hype and Apple bling, and compare performance/price instead.

Maes said:

rectal asshole

This made me laugh because Greeks, while known for anal desire, are not known for tautology.

durisnonfrangor said:

This made me laugh because Greeks, while known for anal desire, are not known for tautology.

This made me laugh because North Americans, who like making fun of Greek for their alleged anal desire, have the largest industrial production of anal porn in the world, straight, black or otherwise (yeah, BLACK anal porn is so awesome that it needs a separate mention). More anal assholes are being fucked EVERY DAY in the American Porn industry than the whole history of Ancient Greece combined.

Yes, but the Greeks have a fixation with ass that stretches back into Antiquity, with copious amounts of classical literature to back up the claim.