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.

Having only worked with Winamp under Windows XP I was unaware that Winamp was installing the files elevator.exe and elveatorps.dll for elevation in Windows Vista and apparently Windows 7 as well as this thread at the Winamp forum suggests.

The easiest way to get rid of the files in the same session is by using the following Windows commands in the command line after switching to the directory Winamp was installed in:


elevator.exe /unregserver
regsrv32 /U elevatorps.dll
regsrv32 /U nscrt.dll


It is likely that these files can also be deleted in Windows Explorer after a restart of the computer system. Users who have UAC disabled in Windows can also get rid of these files according to the forum post quoted above.

Winamp by default comes with the option to import the iTunes media library. It does however not include a similar option to import media from Windows Media Player which is why the software program has been created by the developer.

The application can import the Windows Media Player library into Winamp. This includes audio and videos files, all metadata including ratings and play counts.

The software comes with a few options to customize the import of the Windows Media Player library. It is possible to import all media files or only audio or video files. There is also an option to only import audio and video from an existing playlist.

Three additional options are available. It is possible to ignore files that are already in the Winamp Media Library, remove files from the Winamp Media Library that are not in the Windows Media Player Library and to automatically import on Winamp startup.

The program will not make any changes to Windows Media Player no matter which settings are selected in the application.

Windows Media Player Import is available at the developer’s website. It requires Windows 2000 or higher (means it is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7), Winamp 5 or higher and Windows Media Player 9 or higher.

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.

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 user has to pick a root folder of the mp3 collection at start of the application. That root folder remains as long as it is not changed in the options to another folder. RandoMP3 can be closed after Winamp starts playing the mp3 album.

The root folder has to be rescanned when new mp3 albums have been copied into it. The second application is Charger which can fill a removable device with a specific amount of Megabytes of music. Alternatively it can fill the device until it reports to be full. This program is only directly available in the program folder that RandoMP3 gets installed into.

Charger supports multiple profiles which are useful if multiple users want to work with the software or if multiple devices are in use. The software remembers songs that already have been copied which ensures that no songs will be copied again if new songs that have not been copied yet are available in the mp3 collection.

It would be rather chaotic if both the music player and the video would be playing the music; This is why the developers have made the decision to either play the music in Winamp and mute the video or mute Winamp and play the video with sound.

Minitube has a few additional options that can enhance the experience. It is possible to set the connection to low or high bandwidth, start the video in a window or fullscreen or to automatically hide the player if no video is found or skip to the next song instead.

The playback is normally not synchronous due to the fact that the music track begins playing before the search is conducted. It can also happen that the first result on Youtube is no longer available which would display a “The video is no longer available” message for the duration of the song or that an unrelated video – with the correct song – is pulled from Youtube.

The best application for this would probably be to load a mp3 playlist and select to play the Youtube videos with sound in fullscreen. This would be like a custom music video channel on the Internet.

AIMP is a music player that might not be mentioned that often. The main reason why that is the case is surely the Russian website that is keeping lots of users at bay. Some might spot the player on download portals like Softpedia and those are usually the ones who stick with it after installing and testing the player.

AIMP comes with an impressive design and functionality that leaves most music players behind. It is low on resource usage, provides an impressive sound, great design, an audio converter, CD ripper and Internet radio ripper among other things.

The official website contains a few plugins and skins that can be added to the player but one feature that the player excels in is the compatibility to many Winamp plugins.

One of the winners of a Ghacks t-shirt mentioned a few Winamp plugins that were keeping him from changing to AIMP. A quick research revealed that it was possible to add the plugins to AIMP as well. He mentioned the following three plugins: Minilyrics, DFX and Ozone.

The principle is basically the same for all plugins:

• Download the plugin to the computer.
• Try to extract it using a packer. If that is not working install it. All three plugins could be installed without having Winamp installed. Some might require Winamp though.
• Go to the directory where the files have been extracted / installed into.
• It is usually enough to copy the plugin dll files to the AIMP2/plugins directory. In the case of DFX it is the dsp_dfx.dll, for Ozone it is dsp_iZOzoneFree.dll while Minilyrics requires two: gen_MiniLyrics.dll and MiniLyrics.dll

A rule of thumb. If in doubt copy all files into the directory. AIMP will tell you if something is missing upon activation of the plugin. This is how you do that:

A click on the top left icon will display a menu. Choosing plugins from that menu will open the AIMP Plugin Manager which displays all loaded (meaning active) and unloaded plugins.

New plugins that have been placed in the plugins folder can be activated by selecting them with a left click and clicking on Load afterwards. You will see a message window if something is not right. If the wrong dll has been moved into the plugin directory no plugin will be shown under the Unloaded Plugins tab.

Some plugins, like the DSP ones, require activating in the options of AIMP. A click on the same icon that brought you into the Plugin Manager will also bring you in the DSP Manager. There you can select the Winamp DSP Plugin that has been previously loaded into AIMP.

Not all plugins will work but many will. It is just a matter of trying.

Stefan (German blog) however discovered a very nice feature of Winamp that I also did not know about. It’s not the uber-feature that would drive me back to Winamp but it’s very handy. I’m talking about the Winamp Auto Tagger which can automatically tag selected music tracks by looking them up in Gracenote music database.

Some notes about the process: Winamp Lite users seem to only be able to tag one music track at a time which could mean lots of work if you want to tag many tracks. Just right-click a track and select View File Info from the menu. That opens a new window that is displaying the tags of the selected mp3 track and the Auto-Tag button at the lower right corner.

Users of Winamp Full can use the Send To entry from the right-click context menu to tag multiple music tracks at once.

There might be a use for it though especially if you are among friends in a private channel. Y!Status Revolution brings that to Yahoo Messenger though. Users can select a custom status that includes information like song names and length among others. (A total of seven parameters are available to chose from)

Winamp and AIMP are currently supported to deliver those information and Y!Status Revolution acts as a proxy that changes the status message as soon as a new song begins to play.

There is no information available about supported operating systems or Yahoo Messenger versions. It runs fine on my English Windows XP Service Pack 3 system.

Like iTunes the Winamp iPod plugin can sync songs, ratings and other information between a connected iPod and the Winamp Media Library. The default process makes only sense if the Media Library on the PC would fit on the iPod, if that is not the case the user needs to pick songs that get synced so that their total size is below the capacity of the iPod.

Songs, Videos and Photos can be copied to the iPod using the plugin. There are also some features to manipulate songs before they are moved to the iPod including replay gain, gapless playback, lyrics and album art.

It’s definitely a great software for those users who do not want to download and install the Apple iTunes software which is without doubt resource hungry.

One program that has caught my attention in this sphere is SimplifyMedia. This is a new program which looks quite promising. How does it work? Once you download and install the application, it allows you to share your music libraries on iTunes and Winamp. You can set-up your account and share it with up to 30 friends. Of course, your work address will be one of those friends. However, since you can choose the others, you have access to a wide range of music.

The program also lets you access your library through your iPhone or iPod Touch. Just download the SimplifyMedia app for the iPhone and install it. A word of caution: your iPhone needs to jailbroken before installing the app. Then, you can use a local wi-fi connection to access your music. The iPhone integration is definitely this program’s biggest asset.

There are a few caveats. One, your host computer needs to be online or you cannot access your music. Secondly, you need to have both SimplifyMedia and iTunes running on the host machine. Thirdly, both host and target machines need a reasonably fast internet connection or the playback will be choppy, which is not pleasant for the listener. Lastly, it works only on Windows and Mac, so Linux users are left in the lurch.

The program is still in beta phase so it will definitely get better with time. I’d like to see them add support for more audio player libraries since not everyone uses iTunes or Winamp. What do you think of SimplifyMedia? Are there any features you’d like to see added? Which programs do you use to stream music over the internet?

Simplify Media tops both implementations by offering a way to stream music from iTunes or Winamp over the Internet that can be accessed using iTunes or Winamp. The real benefit besides being able to listen (sort and search) to your own music collection from a different computer is that your friends – better the friends that you invite – can also listen to the music on your computer.

Several limitations have been added to Simplify Media probably to please the Music Industry. The number of invites is limited as is the amount of users who can listen to your music at the same time. Users who are connected to your library cannot save or burn the music either. (unless they happen to use Grab++ or a similar tool)

By default only the folders that you picked during installation will be available for listening. All playlists that have music in those folders will be available as well.

Inviting friends could not be easier as well. Type in their username if they already have an account or their email address so that they receive an email with instructions on how to proceed.

I think it is interesting that it is possible to listen to songs that have been purchased in the iTunes store even if they have DRM protection as long as the user is signed in with his username and the other computer is authorized by the iTunes store as well.

It is most likely that the buffer size is not large enough and therefor needs to be increased. This buffer pre-saves part of the stream which will be used when the connection speed drops. You should now that the connection is never a constant one but varies more or less depending on a handful of factors.

The buffer is therefor mainly used as a counterweight. Here are the ways to increase the buffer size in XMPlay and Winamp.

You right-click the main window of XMPlay and select Options and Stuff from the menu. The Miscellaneous menu has a entry called Internet Streaming, a slider with a default value of 8s. You might need to experiment a little bit with the settings but raising to 10 to 15 seconds should be more than enough normally.

Right-click the main Winamp window as well and select Options > Preferences from the menu. Select Output > Plugins in the menu and click on configure after choosing a plugin from the list. The default plugin is Nullsoft Directsound Output.

Click on the Buffering tab in the new window and adjust the settings. The default values are 2000ms Buffer Lenght, 500ms for Prebuffer and on Buffer-Ahead. Max values are 20000ms which is a lot. I would start by adding 1000ms and testing that setting. Add another 1000ms if the music is still skipping.

I would still like to control the song that is currently played and be able to stop or pause it. Useful when I receive a phone call or need to talk to someone using Skype. I’m using Winamp 2.95 lite which might behave different than those bloated versions that came out more recently. Well, in this Winamp you can right-click and select Options > Preferences. When you are in there you go to Options > Display and select to “Show Winamp in” system tray only. This ensures that Winamp will not use a window in the task bar.

You need a plugin for playing controls in the system tray. This is not necessary if you run a new version of Winamp. The plugin that I’m using is called Tray Control Mercury and can be configured in the options under Plugins > General Purpose. Just select the plugin from the list after installation and choose the controls that you want to see in the system tray. I selected play, stop and open file which should be enough for most users. You can also select next and previous track.

It offers an alternative to using playlists by making it possible to directly play the music of a special folder, this should be nice for most users who do not use customized playlists that use files from different directories. It still is able to use and create playlists of course. 1By1 is able to resume playback at a later time, a feature that is not that common in software mp3 players.

1By1 supports the usual file extensions and offers basic file editing support which includes renaming and copying files during playback. I can see some applications for this lightweight mp3 player, especially on systems that are low on resources already.

I will stick to Winamp light on my main system though because I tend to listen to internet radio a lot and 1By1 is missing that feature. Still, it is a nice player and the directory play option makes it stick out a little bit.

The Hype Machine currently supports Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media Player, Real Player and a online flash player. All songs are downloaded as playlists and will be streamed to your computer. You could use streamripper with Winamp to download the files if you like.

Every time you search for an artist, song or concert you can download the playlist that was created on the fly. You could also download a playlist of the latest mp3 files that have been added to the index or search the most popular or most active music blogs.

A short note on how to activate this beautiful visualization. Download it from the website that I linked to above and install it into your winamp directory. Make sure you select the right directory where winamp is installed. Once that is done you right-click in winamp and select Visualization -> Visualization options. Click on Plugins -> Visualizations in the left pane and start the Mojo Master Visualization plugin and watch her dance.

Once the iPod is connected to the computer it is displayed with all its playlists, albums and files under devices in the media library, you can open the media library with ALT+L for instance. You are able to copy songs and videos from and to your iPod, search for songs, rate songs, edit songs and everything else that you could possibly think off.

The best thing is that this plugin recognizes almost every iPod that was ever released and works with Windows 98 upwards. So, if you are already using Winamp as your main audio player and you own and iPod you should give this plugin a try.

The output plugin section features an extensive guide to the configuration of three output plugins. Everything is explained with screenshots and recommended settings, great if you want to see fast results. The article finally explains the general preferences of winamp as well as file type association with the music player.