I’m trying to figure out which media player I want on my computer. Realplayer is right out. I currently have winamp, which is nice, has lots of cool skins, good visualizations, and will play my videos and music together. But it won’t rip CDs, so I have to have another thing to do that.
At work I have iTunes, which will rip CDs to mp3, but keeps the online radio stations in with the mp3s, which seems kinda retarded to me. I don’t have the latest version, and I’m scared to upgrade. I don’t have an iPod or anything like that, and I’m not really interested in getting one.
I mostly just play mp3s on shuffle while I’m doing other things. I’d like one that won’t take up a lot of resources and is easy to use (which describes most of them these days, doesn’t it?) and will rip to mp3.
So basically, recommend me one. Which one do you use and why?
You are looking for foobar2000 . It is ugly on first sight but has a certain practical appeal, and takes up the least resources of any good media player I know (if you want to get into it you can customize EVERY little aspect of it but its time consuming and a whole nother hobby), great for running in the background. Only plays audio but can play *any *extension you might come across. It will rip to anything you want–for mp3s you want this. I also love the library management capabilities. If you want a simple skin for it that has windows for album art and lyrics, just ask me, I could send you mine and show you how to use it.
For playing videos look into the KMP , it will play anything and everything (including audio, but i like foobar better for that) and do it well.
Main player-- Zoom Player. Small in size, but nice to use. Handles most formats, even FLV and MKV, and is pretty full-featured. Easy GUI interface, and has a feature to skip ahead at a regular interval when you right click on the time-length bar (which has been more handy than I imagined). It also offers a lot of aspect-ratio options; good, since a lot of what I download is incorrectly proportioned, and I can force videos to play in the proper aspect.
Back-up: VLC Media Player. Very small, easy on system resources, though it seems to be flaky about closing properly. Plays practically every video format, including ones Zoom won’t touch like Quicktime, plays broken and incomplete files. Very handy if you get videos via torrent clients-- if you have a semi-complete file, you can usually play what you have. A more basic player, though, than Zoom. Sucks with skipping ahead in videos-- if you don’t hit a keyframe, you get video and color distortion with playback until a keyframe is reached. While not my preferred player-- I’d rather watch something with Zoom or Windows Media Player-- it bravely plays what other players choke on.
You have to use it. I get evangelical about Zoom Player. It doesn’t know how to run bad scripts, if you spend 10 minutes in its settings, you can run it from the keyboard, and it crashes only rarely. I honestly don’t know how the company can provide such a quality product for free.
Oh, and the help forum is read and answered regularly by the lead developer. Beat that with anything else.
Use ZP, Firefox, and don’t DL attachments from people you don’t know. Assuming you don’t go to skanky warez sites, this is about all you need in virus/Trojan protection. I’ve stopped paying for my security program, and I haven’t had any problems while following this guideline.
Second to foobar2000–it’s absolutely the most easy to use, no hassle, does it in one audio player I’ve ever tried. Wickedly comprehensive equalizer, too. For video I use Media Player Classic, which is included in the K-Lite Codec Pack. It plays music too, just as it plays every damned thing including Quicktime and other proprietary files, but I find it more suitable for video. So stable I can pull the window from the TV display over to my monitor display on my laptop while it’s running and have a pretty good shot at NOT melting down my video driver! W00t!
No love for Media player classic? With the realplayer and quicktime plug-ins, there is no video format or codec I cannot play, AFAIK. It even lets you play embedded quicktime and realplayer files on the intarwebs.
I use Music Match Jukebox, mainly because it came with my computer. I used to use winamp back in the day, but I recently gave it another try and didn’t discovered I didn’t care for it any more. For people who have used Music Match, are foobar2000 and Zoom Player any better? If so, why?
I’ll second Media Player Classic here. I use it with the ffdshow codec pack, as well as the Real Alternative, WinAmp Alternative and Quicktime Alternative packs. I’ve set it as my default media player and have not looked back since. It is rock solid AND it is written as a portable app.
I use the latest Vista version of Windows Media Player. Put those stones down!! I haven’t had any problems yet… Then again, I almost never use it, as I usually just stick to Youtube, VeohTV, or regular TV.
I use Winamp. It is simple, compact, and doesn’t take many system resources. Also, I have yet to find another lite player in which I can press the arrow keys to do that quick 5-second skip that works so well in Winamp when I feel like skimming the video I am watching.
ALShow does the 10-second skip with the arrows, as well as Enter to toggle between full screen and regular, and Space to pause/play.
I don’t think it’ll rip to mp3, though…
That jump is one of the biggest reasons I use Zoom Player. I know some others do it too, but WMP and RealPlayer don’t.
Note: I don’t think ZP rips CDs, but that’s never been an issue for me, because I do it with iTunes on the high quality setting. iTunes for video playback is awful.
Oh, and if you set ZP to the default for proprietary file types like .qt and .rm, it will steal the engine from the other installed programs and play the file.
I’ve always used CDex to rip my CDs to mp3. It uses the excellent LAME codec, and the quality is excellent.
Recently, though, i’ve started to ditch my mp3 files and replace them with FLAC-encoded songs. This lossless codec gives excellent sound, and while it does not compress the files as much as mp3, storage is getting so cheap that it’s not much of an issue anymore, at least not for my home PC.
I use Media Player Classic for most video files. I still use Quicktime for their files, because I can save the HD trailers with it. For some other files that will remain nameless on the grounds that it may incriminate me I use VLC because it handles the higher bitrate better and has some useful cropping and aspect ratio features.
