Before we dive into the review we are going to establish some criteria. Instead of looking at the usual like supported formats, we are going to look at the player’s resource usage and feature set as a whole.

AIMP2

aimp2

What the developers say:

AIMP is a full-featured music player designed with sound quality and wide, customizable functionality in mind. Over twenty audio formats are supported. Audio is processed in 32-bit for crystal-clear sound. The player features a 18-band graphics equalizer with extra built-in sound effects. You can extend the existing functionality adding Input, DSP and Gen plug-ins from Winamp. All local and global hotkeys are customizable. Full Unicode support. You can convert AudioCD to MP3, OGG, WAV or WMA. Similarly, you can grab sound from any audio device on your PC to MP3, OGG, WAV or WMA formats.

AIMP2 is a very compact music player that comes with a lot of extras build in. The player supports skins, plugins, hotkeys, comes with multiple interface languages, a tag editor, cover art downloader and full playlist support. In addition to that it can record Internet radio, be configured to automatically shut down, and integrate several Winamp plugins into the player. The resource usage of the player ranges from 5 to 12 Megabytes of computer memory.

XMPlay

xmplay

What the developers say:

XMPlay is an audio player, supporting the OGG / MP3 / MP2 / MP1 / WMA / WAV / AIFF / CDA / MO3 / IT / XM / S3M / MTM / MOD / UMX audio formats, and PLS / M3U / ASX / WAX playlists. A load more formats are also supported via plugins. When XMPlay was first released in 1998, only the XM format was supported, hence the name “XMPlay”.

XMPlay is probably the underdog in this overview. The developer has not updated the music player since December 2009 (but plugins related to that) which does not necessarily mean that development has stopped. There is only that much one can add to a music player, and once that’s done there is virtually no need to update the player, unless other variables change.

XMPlay is a portable application. Like AIMP2 it supports some Winamp plugins, skins, and all the bells and whistles that someone expects from a media player. It’s memory usage is among the lowest of all music players in this guide. It uses roughly 6.5 Megabytes of memory.

Winamp Lite

winamp lite

What the developers say

Not quotes, as Winamp Lite appears to be more of a side project

Winamp, the granddaddy of music players. For this review, we have downloaded and installed Winamp Lite, the least resource intensive but also least feature rich of the Winamp editions. Interestingly enough, it also means that Winamp Lite is the least feature rich music player in this test. It provides basic music playback with everyone would expect, as well as plugin and theme support.

On the resource side, Winamp Lite uses more than 20 Megabytes of memory while playing music.

Foobar 2000

foobar

foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.

Foobar 2000 for a long time was known as a lightweight highly customizable music player. To our surprise, it used the highest amount of computer memory of all test participants. The mp3 player used more than 32 Megabytes of memory during music playback.

It does however offer a lot more than just music playback. It supports visualizations, audio ripping, a music tagger and converter and more. Having said that, players like AIMP2 have a similar functionality with a lower footprint.

Contenders

VUPlayer

vuplayer

1by1

1by1

1by1 is a small and versatile audio player for MP3 and dll/plugin supported audio formats like WAV, OGG, MP2 or CD Audio. Without the need for a playlist it plays multiple files from a directory or a whole disk. You can simply start your tracks in an explorer-style file view, load them through the command line (e.g. if associated with file type) or drag them over the window.

QuuxPlayer

quuxplayer

QuuxPlayer is a sleek audio player that allows users to import and organize music already on their computers as well as access a multitude of online radio stations. The program combines an intuitive interface with useful features, making it a nice alternative to other popular audio players

MooPlayer

mooplayer

Moo0 AudioPlayer is a very simple audio player.

It is very small and simplified for easy use. If you are looking for a lightweight audio player, this may be the one for you. Also, it includes skins in various colors to suit your liking.

Not basic music players, still worth mentioning

Jaangle

jaangle

Jaangle (formerly Teen Spirit) is a free music player and organizer software. It categorizes your mp3, ogg, wma, avi etc collection and displays it in easy to browse, user interface. It has a quality audio – video player and also an integrated tag editor.

Musicbee

musicbee

If you are looking for an application geared toward managing extensive music collections, easy to use and with a comprehensive feature set – MusicBee is that application. MusicBee makes it easy to organize, find and play music files on your computer, on portable devices and on the web.

Atunes

aTunes

aTunes is a full-featured audio player and manager, developed in Java programming language, so it can be executed on different platforms: Windows, Linux and Unix-like systems, …

Currently plays mp3, ogg, wma, wav, flac, mp4 and radio streaming, allowing users to easily edit tags, organize music and rip Audio CDs.

Which music player are you using? Let us know in the comments.

The developers of Google Chrome have added jumplist support recently and it was only a matter of time when other developers released versions of their software programs with jumplist support as well. The latest beta versions of the popular software music player AIMP 2 are also offering jumplist support.

Users who install the latest beta version of AIMP 2 in Windows 7 will notice the jumplist menu when right-clicking the icon in the taskbar. The jumplist provides quick access to recently opened songs in the music player.

There does not seem to be any other features yet but this might change in future releases. The changelogs suggest that the developers are still working on improving compatibility with Windows 7 which could mean additional feature support. Users who are interested in downloading the latest version of AIMP 2 can visit the developer’s website to do so.

ESP is a software program that combines both concepts. It makes use of the Shoutcast directory of Internet Radios that the user can listen to online. It provides the means to record the active stream right away. Other applications that handle this well are Streamripper, Musicy and several music players like AIMP2 or XMPlay.

ESP would not be special in this regard if it would not offer a more or less unique feature in addition to being able to record Internet Radio. The software can automatically search for music that has been publicly made available by the artist or the record company. The developers say that ESP looks only for music that has been uploaded by the artist to social networking websites. The software itself will not display the source of the music download which could be reason enough for cautious users to not use the feature. Tests revealed that it pulled songs from websites like MySpace.

ESP is available for most Windows operating systems including Windows 98, Windows XP and Windows Vista.

The software will automatically search the Internet for information about the current song and display the album art and lyrics in two independent windows. It is possible to refine the search if the first hit did not display the correct items. It can happen that the lyrics are not the only information displayed as the software uses an auto parser to parse the contents.

This can be fixed easily however by simply removing the unnecessary information. Results can be saved so that only those information will be displayed the next time the song is being played on the computer system.

The program can also be configured to look in mp3 and playlists for album art and lyrics before searching the Internet for those information. There is naturally also a way to save the discovered album art and lyrics to the music to make it permanently available.

The first step is to find an Internet radio station. The Shoutcast directory should provide something for every music taste on the planet. A simple click on Tune In should load the stream in AIMP2 if it is configured to play the playlist files of Internet radio. Since we have to configure one setting in the music player’s option anyway I show you how to make AIMP2 the default player for the playlist files first. Once that is done we are going to configure the options to save Internet radio in a proper format and select a directory on the hard drive.

Pressing [CTRL P] after starting AIMP2 will open the player’s options. Selecting the Associations entry under System will bring up the various compatible file types the player can play. If AIMP2 is your default player you can simple click on the Enable All button to associate all file types with AIMP2. The important file type for Internet radio is .pls which you find at the bottom.

AIMP2 should now start playing the Internet radio whenever you click on a link that leads to an Internet radio playlist. Now head over to the Streaming menu under Player.

You have to pick a folder where the music from the Internet radio station will be saved in. A directory of the data will automatically be added in the root directory. The second option is about the format of the recorded music. The default is wave which takes up lots of space on the hard drive. A better option would be to select mp3 as the format. Either 192 or 256 Kbit should be good choices. Other choices are ogg or flac.

Now that the settings have been made it is time to start the recording. The recording option is only available in the main client and not in the minimal client. You can start the recording by clicking on Radio Cap on the left side of the player. A blinking text indicates that the player is recoding the music.

Users who would like to record more than one station at a time might want to take a look at Streamripper instead.