Trout can be downloaded as a portable version or installer. It supports a wide variety of audio formats including mp3, ogg, wma, flac and others. Music can be loaded by dragging and dropping files or folders into the interface or by using the menu toolbar at the top. All audio files that have been loaded into the player are displayed in the playlist area in the lower half. This area contains not only information about the names of the songs but also information about bitrates, sizes, artist and album tags and more.

Songs can be sorted by clicking on one of the columns. It is for example possible to sort by album, artist, playing time or filename. Trout offers a set of features that many expect from today’s music players. This includes support for Internet radio streams, freeDB support for audio CDs, compatibility with most tag formats and tag editing, hotkeys, lyrics, album covers or various play modes. Track announcements are another interesting feature that are great when listening to audiobooks.

The minimized music player needs less than 3 Megabytes of computer memory while playing and therefor ideal for low end computer systems. The free music player Trout is compatible with all Microsoft operating systems from Windows 9x on including Windows XP and Windows Vista. It can be downloaded directly from the developer’s website.

But others want the music player they use to look more modern, or they want a certain feature to be available.
Most people who first start using foobar2000 don’t know that it also provides these options, and that you can have a music player that is able to beat most others when it comes to looks and options.

Foobar2000 has an extension system called components, which come in the form of dll files. These components are easily installed by copying them into the components directory of your Foobar2000 directory, after this you need to start/restart Foobar2000 and you can use them.

Foobar2000 has an extension system called components, which come in the form of dll files.
These components are easily installed by copying them into the components directory of your Foobar2000 directory, after this you need to start/restart Foobar2000 and you can use them.

There are components such as “Decoding speed test” which tests the decoding speed, to “Panels UI” which is able to change the entire look and feel of Foobar2000.

You can find several “configs” for Foobar2000 on the internet, Fooblog has a list of a few of them. They often list the required (and optional) components needed but if this is not the case you can find them in the readme files of the config.

Many of the required components can be found in the Hydrogen audio wiki, they have a list of the components available for the Foobar2000 0.9 release.

After you installed the components you need to follow the instructions on which files to copy and where they should go, then you need to restart Foobar2000 and with a few clicks you have a music player that looks nothing like the one you started with.
As i mentioned before, components are not only used to change the look but they can also do much more, it even has an component for lyrics.

So if you like Foobar2000 be sure to look through the list at the Hydrogen audio wiki for other components that you might like, and be sure to amaze your friends with your music player.

It supports all major audio formats such as mp3 and ogg format, plays internet radio streams, supports playlists, compressed files, library functions, skins, plugins and a lot more. Did I mention that it is possible to save mp3 streams that are automatically named to your hard drive ?

The XMPlay support site lists 70 skins and more than 200 plugins that can be installed to enhance the music player even further. You do need to create the directories for skins and plugins though. They are subdirectories of the root directory named Skins and Plugins.

Just copy the files into those directories and restart XMPlay to enable them. Several plugins exist for playing audio formats that are not that common. You can enable flac, mp4 or aac support for instance using plugins.

Oh, I forgot to mention that it uses only 6 Megabytes of Ram when playing an Internet radio stream while Winamp uses more than 20 Megabytes (the smallest Winamp version that is).

XMPlay is by far the best mp3 player that I have been using. Goodbye Winamp..