Comments on: The Complete Media Player Review (Part 1)

By: Sasha Kovaliov

Sasha Kovaliov — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:30:00 +0000

Great article!

I’ve been doing similar research this winter and if you are interested check our the series of Music Players in 10 blog posts:
http://my.opera.com/nlupus/blog/index.dml/tag/media%20players

By: Joe Smooth

Joe Smooth — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 22:39:37 +0000

Sometimes Simple is better. I have been using “Zoom Player” for 3 years as the heart of my media center. It’s simple, uses any codec configuration you want and is the only program that natively allowed me to pipe undecoded dolby to the stereo.

By: Angelo R.

Angelo R. — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 07:29:03 +0000

Hahah I suppose you have a point.. I also didn’t like how it was terrible for adding new music to the playlist. I like having all my music present and I can just pick and choose what album I feel like listening to at the moment. VLC took too long.

By: Dotan Cohen

Dotan Cohen — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 07:27:16 +0000

VLC has media management?!?

By: Techbuzzard

Techbuzzard — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 06:29:09 +0000

I use Media Monkey the most. Extremely useful for tagging and as well as for playing MP3′s. The second would be SM Player and then VLC.

By: Angelo R.

Angelo R. — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 21:18:56 +0000

@Dotan Yea, if all goes well, within the next few months Amarok 2.0 will be available for Windows.

@Andreas That’s the only reason I ever used FooBar and VLC. For a while I was all about the minimalist applications and those were all I used, but VLC had the worst media management, and FooBar was a bit ungainly to get the hang of using.

By: Dotan Cohen

Dotan Cohen — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:37:42 +0000

I agree with Angelo, Amarok is one amazing piece of music-management software. There should be a Windows version in the next few months, from what I understand.

By: Mayor of Kentonville

Mayor of Kentonville — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 16:19:15 +0000

Great Post

By: Andreas

Andreas — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:31:50 +0000

I really like Mediamonkey. Because it’s just perfectly easy to tag mp3′s with information and picture from the internet when you rip them from cd.

FooBar is cool, because it uses not too much memory.

By: Björn

Björn — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:56:13 +0000

What about the ability to manage and play video files? Isn’t this a main feature of a media player in times of “youtube” & co.??

This is the reason why I use Winamp. Itunes is limited in playing video file formats (i.e. flv) without converting the files and Foobar is “only” a music player and no media player (but a wonderful player).

I hope Songbird will combine all my wishes:
- minimal Design (ok, it’s a copy of Itunes)
- manage and play the main music and video formats
- web integration
- PlugIn support

By: David

David — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:11:28 +0000

My order of media players from best to worst that I use:
1. VLC
2. WMP (above VLC for wmv)
3. GOM Player
http://www.gomlab.com/eng/GMP_Introduction.html

An unused media player that I rarely use is MXPlay. My version is outdated and the program is still in beta, but I like the option to change the direction of sound (just for fun). It also has a load of new features that have been added since my version.

http://blog.mxplay.com/

By: cyneuron

cyneuron — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:20:44 +0000

winamp is definitely the winner….(just wish for autoplay feature and last.fm integration…

mediamonkey seconds the list….

and noting beats Amarok on Linux….(if it was available on windows, definitely would have been the winner of all…prime example of open source software quality)

By: Angelo R.

Angelo R. — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:00:31 +0000

Amarok is currently my music player of choice, but I’ve tried out WMP, WinAmp, iTunes, FooBar, VLC and a few others. .out of all of them, I actually preferred WMP. It’s tight integration with Windows is what finally did it for me. Plus I found iTunes way too slow and laggy on my machine. Plus, like you said, the automatic updates were a huge hassle.

By: Asgaro

Asgaro — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:21:51 +0000

I tried Foobar a few months ago but found it way too hard to customize.

So I have been trying Songbird 0.7 since its release a few days ago :)
Loving it so far!

By: b1k3r4ck

b1k3r4ck — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:54:53 +0000

I use winamp. I’ve tried to change several times looking for something that does everything winamp does and then some. The “then some” for me would be the one thing I like about iTunes … party shuffle.

I’ve given up. Winamp does everything I want it to minus the party shuffle. It’s got an attractive interface, it’s not a huge resource hog, I like how it manages my collection (20k tracks and growing), plays most any stream format I want to listen to, last.fm support and it’s easily moved from one install to another. I’m hoping they put in some kind of comparable party shuffle feature in a future release though!

The one thing I’ve found that is close is Amarok. I may play with version 2 when it comes out and can be run on Windows.

I used MediaMonkey for a while too but there were a few quirks with how it handled my library that I didn’t like in the end.

All of that said I still use mp3tag for my tagging though. :P