You can’t ignore the fact that at some point of time, you’ll listen to music on your computer. Whether it’s a CD, mp3, or some internet radio, you have to admit that it’s a great way to keep yourself occupied.
Listening to music only needs a software program that does the needful. This brings me to my question for all the readers. What program do you use to listen to music on your PC? I know it sounds a little strange but I’m curious about preferences of the folks who visit Ghacks.
There are a lot of audio players out there. For most people, I guess it doesn’t make that big a difference as long as it plays the songs. But I know some people who are vary particular. How did you select your player? Did you like how it looked or how you could customize it? Were you looking for something that could play specific audio formats?
I’ll start the ball rolling. I listen to music on my computer everyday and my player of choice is Winamp 2.8. Yeah, I know it’s old but what can I say. I started using it 8 years ago and I guess it’s grown on me. I want to try the Linux player Amarok though. With all the rave reviews I keep hearing, I can’t wait for it to be developed for Windows.
Some of the other players I know about are Media Monkey, iTunes, Songbird, Foobar2000, etc. Drop me a line and tell me what your favorite player is and why.
Related Articles:
XMPlay a lightweight audio playerJet Audio, A Versatile Music Player For Windows
ALSong a music player with lyrics
Music Player XMPlay Updated Adds Crossfading Support
How to Extract Audio from Video Files using VLC Media Player
Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article with your friends and contacts on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ using the icons below.
Me using the Nero Showtime latest version..i feel it gives a much better digital output
I use iTunes as I have an iPod so it contains my huge library, but I use WMP to play my favourite playlist when I’m gaming. This is because I have a G11 keyboard with media keys at the top that control WMP even when it’s running in the background, whereas it only works with iTunes when it is in the foreground.
iTunes is annoying in the way that it is very locked down, but I have the iTunes playlist exporter to export my playlists to formats that are friendly with WMP.
I mostly use VLC for playing music, but occasionally I use Windows Media Player.
i use windows media player 11… gives me good features in terms of library and playlists… i could do without the burner etc… but what the hell… looks super cool.
xm player is another good one… has a tiny footprint.
aimp2 is my choice since when I discovered it.. it has tabs for playlists, infos of every song showed directly in the playlist, a lot of useful features like copy to clipboard the song you’re listening to or capture radio streaming and much more.. must try it!
http://www.aimp.ru/
tried a few in the past was a winamp fan for years (until AOL took it over) now I use foobar2000
AIMP2 replaced Winamp 2 on my system a few months ago… I don’t know how I’d never come across it before!
Out of the box it has all the looks of Winamp 5 without the bloat, a huge range of options, nice crossfading and plays a much wider range of file formats than anything else I’ve come across. Also includes a set of utilities with it which are nicely separated from the player avoiding bloat for those who don’t want their player to also be their library, CD ripper/burner etc etc.
It also has Winamp compatibility for plugins although I’ve found this to be hit and miss in cases where the plugin expects to actually find a copy of Winamp somewhere. Works for my music blogging on Last.FM though :) Well worth a look!
BTW – if you really want to give Amarok a go and you don’t mind a good afternoon of downloading to get it sorted, have a look at the blog post here -
http://favdiggs.blogspot.com/2008/02/howto-run-amarok-under-windows-xp.html
I am still using WinAmp. On its own it is nothing special but it has a wonderful plug-in called Dynamic Library which searches the entire library as I type an entry, it makes it fabulously easy to locate any track.
I’m using both iTunes and MediaMonkey. I use iTunes coz i have and iPod, but b4 i have an iPod i started using iTunes too…. I like it bcoz MSN will display wat i’m playing in my iTunes….. I use MediaMonkey for other format such as FLAC, APE etc….
I sort of use a 3 program approach (overkill I know):
1. Media Monkey for regular playback… Fast, flexible, light on resources even with a huge library, and most importantly an amazing tagging application.
2. iTunes for transferring songs to ipod. MediaMonkey claims to have this capability, but I feel it is poorly implemented. iTunes is straight forward in this regard…
3. Winamp (any version with XM Radio)… I simply love the radio stations offered through the integrated xm radio on Winamp… great for trying to find new music.
Foobar200, why?:
1) it’s pretty lightweight
2) has a clean and simple interface
3) global hotkeys for users who don’t have a MM keyboard (though most players have global hotkeys nowadays)
i-tunes to connect with i-pod
but also foobar, foobar and foobar in everyday life because it is so much lighter than i-tunes
I was a Winamp user, but then dropped it when it became too bloated.
Foobar is cool because it’s really straight to the song.
I’ve just switched from Winamp to XMplay as recommended by Martin in his blogs. I like it a lot and will probably keep it as my default music player now.
I use Winamp for music and VLC Player for video because it simply plays everything! :)
XMPlay (default audio) and AIMP2 : BASS technology releases sound like no one!
Otherwise, whatever bloated it may be, Windows Media Player does play quite good IMO.
The worst I’ve met was RealAudio : anything but real!
Winamp only for Gracenote DB and CD ripping… We stopped being in love after version 2.x …
VLC, Winamp or Media Player Classics
I daily use iTunes when I listen to the music because of its splendid CoverFlow, even though I’m currently appreciating Songbird with this feature. On Linux the plum is Amarok!
Years ago I used Winamp, I forget why I migrated away from it. Anyhow, I started using WMP 9, now 11. It does what I want, namely plays music, without a bunch of features I don’t use and that just clutter up the GUI.
In my house, Foobar2000 since I only have WindowsXP here, but in my office I use Linux Mint and Amarok to listen music.
I use Cowon’s Jetaudio exclusively, for 2 big reasons:
1. It plays every type of music on the market.
2. It plays every type of video on the market.
Mostly VLC or GOM player but I also have KM Player which is excellent and extremely customizable
WinAmp5 with classic skins (modern support probably uninstalled ;P).
No CPU floods, everything work OK.
I can’t see the difference in performance between Winamp 2.x and 5.x. Of course, 3rd edition was hopeless but 5.x is IMHO very good.
Me, i’m using vlc player. There’s no big interface, it’s simple and does what it should: it plays music. sometimes i also listen to windows media player, because i can open it, click on play and it plays randomize through my library without much work for me.
Foobar. It’s light weight and highly customizable with global hotkeys you can set up for changing music easily at any time.
I love customization so Foobar is really the only choice for me.
for music I use Winamp 2.91
I think it’s Winamp 2.91 STD Final (1.62 mo)
memory, because Winamp 2.91 Lite Final (623ko) doesn’t read ogg and Winamp 2.91 Full Final (2.21 mo) is useless for me.
for a very long recording of several hours, I use media player classic, it’s possible to resize his window “to seek” easily.
iTunes for iPod
Foobar2000 for audio
VLC for video
Amrok for radio
Winamp 5. It’s got way less baggage than Itunes, it works out of the box (not a lot of tweaking needed), and I still get a robust media library.
I use Foobar2000 to listen to my fovorite albums, I have lot of playlists here, a playlist for each artist. It’s light weight, highly customizable and very good in sound quality. You can change everything in this player.
Foobar2000 is the Firefox of music :)
For occasional mp3s I use instead KMPlayer, my favorite multimedia player, so that if by mistake I click on a mp3, the music i was listening doesnt stop and the playlist on Foobar remains untouched.
I use Amarok when working at home (I run Linux). Recently started working in an office regularly at a WinXP machine and been using winamp, mainly because I’d used it in the past and foobar2000 didn’t seem to have a decent media library component (not one I could find intuitively).
Might take a look at AIMP and/or MediaMonkey…
If I could figure out how to get pulseaudio/andLinux to recognise my USB headphones as an audio sink, I’d probably be using Amarok on XP too!