in your opinion, what is the best media player that can play songs, videos, Internet radio, and any other bells or whistles that makes it stand out from the rest?
free downloads would be ideal… although, I am open to any demos or shareware/trials for consideration.
finally, why is yours better than the rest?
(I seriously hate Winamp)
I really like Windows Media 10. Also, I’ve got iTunes running right now in the background.
Love me some Ronnie Milsap!
I tried Zinf for a while, it’s pretty good, but after a system re-image I’m back to WinAmp again. For what that’s worth…
I also use Windows Media Player 10. It does what I want and is on (virtually) every computer.
can you elaborate on that a bit? I’m not too clear on what you mean
Windows media player works fine for me.
I’ve not tried WMP 10. I used to use 9, until I finally got majorly pissed off at it, because it insisted it knew what my CDs were better than I did. (I’m a Gilbert and Sullivan fan. And so I tend to get the odder operetta soundtracks in the complete version: Yanno, the whole musical portion of the thing? And the only version of The Mikado WMP 9 believed could possibly exist was an excerpt album containing songs from The Mikado and The Sorcerer. Which made it impossible to find “A More Humane Mikado…” when I wanted to listen to some monster snarkiness. And worse, it kept rewriting my track names, if I let it get the track information for any CD.)
I currently use iTunes. I’m mostly satisfied. There are a few features I miss from WMP - specifically, I can’t have iTunes select an album at a time to play, like I could in WMP, but when it matters I can work around it. And it only gets track names for the tracks I ask it to find names for…
I’m not going to say it’s perfect, but it’s done less to annoy me than WMP did. And it works well enough.
I had to re-install everything after upgrading motherboards (had a power failure and the cheapie PSU blew the MB, new one didn’t work with the old OS). When I did that I was back to WinAmp - since Zinf is freely downloadable, I didn’t make a backup of it, but I did have my favorite version on WinAmp backed up.
Path of least resistance, you could call it…
It might help if you explain what you don’t like about winamp. Or what do you want in a media player that winamp doesn’t have?
I use windows media player myself simply because it’s widely available and it works fine. And it integrates the best with Microsoft DRM-compatible devices.
You make a very good point and I apologize for the ambiguity.
in a media player I would like it be:
Internet friendly so I can click links to audio files as well as video without having to wait for the winamp to load up…
I get my news in the morning from the Internet radio (reliable sources, of course) do I tend to scurry.
also, I tend to multitask when loading the news or media so I really would not refer a resource Hog.
Playlists are important. I’ll click three or four links and winamp will only display one. I have to go back through the entire process again and again until I finally listen to everything.
finally, streaming radio functionality…pretty self-explanatory. I hope this helps!
on a side note, I gave media player 10 from Windows a shot a while back. I wasn’t impressed and it didn’t seem to fit my needs
oh, and possibly compatable with firefox!!!
For movies and music on my computer, I use Nero’s media player. It’s controls are simpler and it’s less fussy when it comes to making things full screen. It’s just more compatible with my uses and probably wouldn’t be best for most.
Oh, sorry, I wasn’t trying to admonish you or anything if that’s what it sounded like – I was just asking for more info so we’d know what to recommend 
And, hmm… strangely, I think Winamp is still the best player according to what you asked for. Have you tried Winamp Lite (the barebones, slimmed-down version of Winamp)?
Winamp Lite is one of the fastest-loading media players out there. It’s significantly smaller & faster than regular ol’ bloated Winamp. Every media player has to have some loading time. Some media players “cheat” at this by loading themselves when your computer first starts and then waiting in the background. They still have to load, they just do it at a different time. If you want, Winamp can do this too using the included “Winamp Agent”.
Winamp Lite also happens to be one of the “lighter” players. Only takes up 6 to 10 MB of memory for me.
This is actually just a matter of settings, not media player. In Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer), go to Tools → Folder Options. In the “File Types” tab, look for “M3U”. Click “Advanced” and set “Enqueue blah blah blah…” as the default action. Do the same thing for the “MP3” filetype and the “WMA” filetype. That’ll make these files enqueue automatically.
Alternatively, you can CTRL-click on several files in Explorer to select them individually. Then, right click on any selected file and choose “Enqueue in Winamp”. That’ll add all the selected files to your Winamp playlist.
Winamp handles these too, with the added benefit of being able to minimize itself to the system tray so that it doesn’t take up taskbar space.
Like you, I wanted a player that can do all of this… I hate the regular, bloated Winamp, but Winamp Lite works like a dream for me. You might want to give it a try.
Another “lite” player that has many similar features is Foobar 2000, but IMHO it’s butt-ugly and doesn’t really offer much over Winamp.
Yep, Winamp Lite is 