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What mp3 player do you use?

P

Paithar

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jul 17, 2003
Messages
1,049
My dad, who has a crapload of mp3's, is in need of a good mp3 player for Windows XP. I had an older version of Musicmatch that he was using for a little while but he's had quite a lot of problems with it. So then a neighbor told him to use one of the old version of Winamp because the new versions suck. Well, he thinks winamp is ok but he doesn't like how slow it is to scroll through his huge list of mp3's just to find the ones he wants. I guess it doesn't organize the music very well. I have a newer version of winamp but I don't have that many mp3's on my system so I can't really say that it's any better than an older version.

My dad doesn't seem to like Windows Media Player (he has version 10) but that's probably because I don't really care for it and he seems to think that I know what the hell I'm talking about when it comes to that stuff. He likes the way Musicmatch organizes the files but with all the problems he's been having with it he's pretty frustrated.

So I'm wondering what some of you use to play your mp3's on your pc that also does a fairly nice job of keeping the mp3's at least somewhat organized?

Thanks
 
There is an option that you can select in winamp that will preload all the meta data from the mp3s at list generation, so it's not slow when you scroll back and forth through the list.

Maybe give that a shot.
 
I'd recommend WinAmp still, overall most other software doesn't have the options. Personally I prefer Winamp 3, 5 is based on the old Winamp 2 code.

there is another one that I have used that is very quick with song lists, but I hate how it makes you use a playlist and takes up too much screen space, it's called like foo or spoof or spoo or something like that, I haven't used it in a while and it is back on my home computer.
 
I was skeptical at first. I had used Winamp (various versions), windows media player (various versions), and fubar 2000.

I installed Itunes one day, tried it for a couple of hours and uninstalled it. I then installed it again to help someone setup their IPOD and started to realise the power of ITunes in terms of media library organization. From the software I have used it can't be beat for ease of use and organization. He can literally type it whatever he is looking for and it'll find it in seconds. Also with the Genre, Artist and Album categories he can browse his music library with ease. The music library (and the fact that now I own an IPOD) is the reason I use ITunes.

I'd say give it a shot and see if he likes it after a week or so. If I was going to give it some negative feedback though I'd say it is admitedly bloated compared to Winamp (especially the older versions) but the functionality is nice.
 
newer versions of winamp have a media library that can do all the things you mentioned that iTunes does. its what I use myself and I'm very happy with it.
 
Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I was talking to my dad a little while earlier and he said that he went out and downloaded the newest version of winamp. He said he hasn't used it very much just yet but from what little he has he thinks it'll do just fine.
 
iTunes. You can't beat the ease-of-use. I once sweared by Winamp 2, but that was years ago. Also, I like how iTunes organizes tracks. I've got over 3K tracks and it works great for me.

I've also purchased a Pro copy of Musicmatch 10, but I use that only for syncing with my Dell DJ Gen2 30GB player. Once, Musicmatch was my personal choice... I think looong ago it was completely free.

I'd say this: Get him to try iTunes. If that doesn't suit him, try the free Musicmatch 10 and upgrade if necessary. It bugs you every so often to upgrade, but at $19.99 it's reasonable. Super-tagging is a great feature, but Musicmatch seems to lose track of its own files if you use it to organize. I let iTunes organize and Musicmatch just to watch for changes and sync.
 
Winamp3 + MMD3 skin forever!

Actually, Winamp5 is probably tolerable if you haven't used Winamp3 much. I've tried Winamp5 a few times, and after two or three days I have to switch back. I can't stand the context menu changes and the absence of Winamp3 features.

I never used Winamp2, so I'm very partial to 3.
 
Creative Touch = :D

No crappy proprietary software to use
Large drive capacity
Great features
Works on Linux
Windows, OSX, and UNIX see the player as an external drive
 
I'll have to check out a couple of these others and see what they're like. I didn't know that xmms had an XP version. I've used xmms on linux before and it seemed like it was basically a winamp clone (or maybe it's the other way around winamp is a clone of xmms I don't know).

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.
 
I'm using winamp 5 with a cool classic skin now. Can't say I've used many others, but compared to itunes it has a much smaller appetite for system resources (important when running in the background while gaming) and as far as I know can do everything itunes can. If you want to find a file in a list of 10,000 songs, just press "j" and then type the name of the song and you're set. As another poster already said you can preload all of the song's data when a list or directory is added, although that does cause a bit of an initial delay that goes up with the number of songs. Not really noticeable until you add several hundred songs or more at a time.

I've tried VLC, but it's just not as user friendly as winamp for music anyways. VLC is a winner for video files though.
 
Musicmatch Jukebox 10 Premium ($19.99 lifetime) is my player and I really like it. A lot of people use the iTunes software...I don't like Winamp because I think Media Player and MM both are better at sorting music, playlists etc.

my .02
 
When it comes to organizing music, few people are as meticulous as I am. I actually rename every file's filename and ID3 tags. I've edited...over 5000 songs manually. I can't stand filenames that are mostly gibberish with underscores and lower case letters. They have to be uniform and proper.

As for the player organizing music, it's a little misleading. iTunes displays your songs nicely, but it doesn't sort them in the folders for you (unless you bought them from iTunes). Many players display songs nicely, but if the songs themselves aren't organized neatly, well, it bothers some of us.

I've tried iTunes, and I still have it installed. I like to use it to preview music, but now I have Ruckus through my university. I haven't actually opened iTunes for months. I don't like how iTunes makes my music sound. I messed with the equalizer but something was amiss. I've never had a problem with Winamp's processing.

I've tried Foobar 2000, and I'm sure it's a wonderful program, especially with its small footprint, but I'm not a programmer and I don't have the patience right now to customize it. The MMD3 skin for Winamp includes a horizontal interface, which has yet to be beaten by any other skin I've tried or seen. It's perfect for me.

I had MusicMatch and other players once but it wasn't so amazing that I had to keep it. Plus it's also a music store, and that's functionality I don't need.

Recently I came across Quintessential, which has nice ID3 editing feature and an appealing default skin. It's highly customizable, including how songs are displayed. I tried to find a nice horizontal skin for it, but nothing beats MMD3.

Not that anyone cares about my personal experience with digital music players, but I thought I'd offer it. I don't even remember what sparked me to click Post Reply, or Submit Reply for that matter.
 
Foobar FTW. Easy interface, fast loading, awesome SQ. Can't beat it. It is a very minimal player, though. Not many bells and whistles.
 
Foobar2000 here. I like the tabbed playlists, low resource usage, and sound quality.
 
Foobar2000 version 0.9.1. I organize my music differently so I don't really care about it's internal organizer.
 
Motorola SLVR

edit: oh u mean on the PC. Winamp for general listening. Itunes for putting stuff on my SLVR ;)
 
I don't organize at all, lol. I just keep them semi-sorted into three folders, 01 - favorites, 02 - likes, and 03 - ok.

Anyway, I use Foobar2000. I love winamp, but, I really hate the direction it's going. It's turning into a bloated thing like WMP and will someday soon no longer be usable if it doesn't stop it's current crash course. Right now Winamp is still among the best, but, well, it's already doing integration type stuff (video player a long time ago, more recently stuff like CD burning, and who knows what next.) (BTW, MMD3 is a great skin for Winamp, I fully agree on that count. I've been using that one ever since I found it maybe a year ago.)

Only thing I hate about Foobar. The stupid thing REQUIRES a PCM input to the core itself. It won't handle anything else. In particular, this means no MIDI except via a very crappy emulation (supposedly if you can find some VSTs -- all of which appear to be commercial and hard to find besides -- you can get it close to the same quality, but, between my soundfonts and the option of the Yamaha S-YXG software I really don't want to use their crappy emulation.) I suspect this can turn out to be a problem with something else someday as thsi sounds like a limitation that can end up holding it back (after all, winamp doesn't absolutely require that it get PCM input from everything.)

Foobar does have one thing I like though. Bit-accuracy. At least, I know it can do 8-bit to 32-bit and floating point. If there is anything out there actually using > 32-bit, I guess it would be limited in Foobar (not to mention by your soundcard and practically every sound processing program out there.) Conversely, Winamp is limited to 16-bit or 8-bit and higher things like MAD either completely bypass winamp's system (eg no equalizer or dsp) or have to be dithered down, more or less defeating the whole point.

IMO, iTunes sucks. I have a UMS capable MP3 player (a lovely Cowon U3 -- man these are nice) so I just drag and drop anything I want to listen to. I really can't stand the idea of having to be forced to use a particular software for synchronizing and tracking everything. iTunes IS better than WMP mind you. Not that that's saying very much. And yeah, VLC is just not made for audio playback. It really wasn't made for video playback directly (it's supposed to be through a lan, hence the name) either, but, it definitely lacks the basics needed to make a good audio player (even through lan I'd rather setup a shoutcast or something.)

Foobar I think does help with organizing things. Mind you, since my filesystem and music files are messier than my room I really can't tell you for certain much about it's organizing abilities since I don't exactly use them much.
 
GJSNeptune said:
As for the player organizing music, it's a little misleading. iTunes displays your songs nicely, but it doesn't sort them in the folders for you (unless you bought them from iTunes). Many players display songs nicely, but if the songs themselves aren't organized neatly, well, it bothers some of us.
Click to expand...

You can get iTunes to organise your music into folders, there's a checkbox in preferences somewhere, the only thing is it only organises songs you've put in your 'iTunes' folder.
Also it only organises into Artist-->Album-->Song, but that's how I'd organise it anyway.
 
i used to use foobar2000. but since i picked up a shuffle i've been using itunes with the multi plugin and play music using the foobar2000 passthrough
biggrin.gif
 
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