Favorite music manager/jukebox

Which program is your favorite... and why?

 

I have been using Winamp for around 8 years now and am a big fan of that. Wonderful player, with lots of Audio/DSP enhancements and I like the player for the simplicity yet with high functionality, and ease of use. As for organizing / managing, I do it out of the player while I am collecting the music as a first step itself and I have something like 180 gig' worth of music right now in my collection. I just make playlists out of the different folders which I play whenever I want any specific genre of music. Anyway, for me this works and this is comfortable

I also like the tagging thing thats been incorporated into Winamp.. the stuff with that gracenote database thing... its fun with those autotagging.. Anyways. Cheers.

 

WinAmp, because it works.

 

QFT I use winamp for a lot of these reasons.

 

Other: Windows Media Player 9. I don't like the interface changes in 11, and 10 isn't as reliable/stable as 9. I've tried Winamp for about 10 minutes before deciding to ditch it, and skip iTunes in protest of Apple's policies with regards to DRM and ease of playing iTunes music on whatever player you like.

Mostly it's just always worked the way I wanted it to, so there's been no reason to hunt around for alternatives.

Currently using WMP 10 due to requirements to use 10 or 11 with my online music provider, and probably will be for the indefinite future, unless 12 comes up with an interface I like more.

 

Windows - Zune, plays everything I need, syncs my zune.
Linux - AmaroK/Exaile/Banshee, depending on the Desktop Environment

 

doe Windows Media Centre count? thats what i have been using

 

Winamp.... without a doubt!

 

MediaMonkey for me.

 

After you mentioned this... and I remembered having read a few good things about the latest version of the Zune software... I decided to install it and try it out.

It was fun, neat-looking, and fairly easy to use, but... HOLY MOTHER OF ALL FREAKING RESOURCE HOGS!!!!!!!!!!!!! My CPU usage was up to about 60% after just idling for a while... and memory usage quickly got up to 120 mb or so... how can I enjoy music with my laptop fans sounding like a jet engine? Maybe that would be less of a problem on a desktop PC. Anyway... enough with that program for a while. It's too bad... they did a nice job with the UI design.

 

foobar2000.
- lots of customization
- in Unicode
- I'm just used to using it.

 

Winamp
-fast
-customizable

 

Winamp, reasons: as mentioned above

I find it simple, fast, low ressources needed

But for video i clearly prefer Windows media player because i dont find winamp appropriate for video and i always had video codec problems with winamp and not Windows but for music i never use/used WMP, always winamp

Plus... omg i love the extreme slim interface (the one u can put but clicking the box between the _ and the X

 

COWON Jet Audio software

- free
- great sound quality with the renowned cowon jet effects
- built in tagging, converting music, video and more

 

Working fine for me, as for being a resource hog, my CPU is at 20% at the moment.

It uses about 50MBs of RAM for me.
It lurvs me!

 

Trying out Winamp, I like it better then both Foobar and Zune, I wonder if it can sync my zune...

 

I've used iTunes for a long time

but I'm trying winamp ad it's nice, hmmm which to use...

 

ok, I've now tried out:

WMP11, MediaMonkey, Songbird, Winamp, Foobar2000, Zune Software, iTunes

Here are the main features I was interested in when evaluating these programs:
- Ease of navigation through large library
- Optional group-by-album view of library, with album art
- View playlist alongside library view
- Show album art associated with currently-playing track
- Appearance
- Customization (skins, etc.)
- Smooth handling/rendering of UI (scrolling, etc.)
- Proper title sorting (puts "The Beatles" under B, not T).
- Sync with portable devices (especially MTP devices since that's what I use)
- Resource consumption. Low CPU use when idle, and moderate CPU use while playing. Reasonable memory footprint

I like most of them but none of them are perfect... there are things I like and don't like about each of them.

But my overall favorite is... Windows Media Player 11. I just like its interface the best. At least when setting the top-level Artist view to details, which is what I use. Then the scrolling speed becomes ok (not the best, but acceptable). I use the album art view for the album/song list for after I choose an artist. So I can choose an artist from my artist list and then choose an album/song on the next screen, kind of like with a portable mp3 player. I find this easier than having a bunch of different panes like in iTunes, Songbird, or Winamp's library manager. And I love how it's got the playlist/synclist pane on the right, so I can drag songs over to it. And it syncs with my Sansa Fuze, along with other MTP and MSC devices. (No iPods though... or at least it's not built-in.) Apparently you can skin it too, but I haven't played with this yet. It looks nice in the default setup.

Ultimately, WMP11 won for me mainly because I like its Explorer-like navigation system better than the multi-pane/giant-list setup used by Winamp/Songbird/iTunes. Plus, I can view my playlist side-by-side with my library, unlike iTunes/Songbird/Foobar.

Runner-up: Winamp. I like the Big Bento skin, but it used way too much CPU at idle so I had to tweak the performance settings and now it's alright. Scrolling is very fast. I do get occasional screen flickering though, at least with the Bento skin. Library manager is nice but its interface can feel a bit busy compared to WMP. Still, if you like the multi-pane view, it does that very well. Tons of skins to play with. Unfortunately, most of the skins don't show album art... oh well, at least Bento does. And unlike iTunes (but like WMP and MediaMonkey), I can view my playlist alongside my library view. It claims to sync with any MTP or MSC device, and iPods as well. I've used the MTP sync feature with my Fuze and it works just fine.


As for the others (in no particular order)...

MediaMonkey is nice but the UI feels cluttered to me. I'm sure there are lots of great features or something... I don't like any of the skins it comes with but I found the MM-Ultimate skin which is pretty nice. It doesn't fix the noisy, cluttered aspect of the UI though. There are also just some UI quirks, like in group-by-album view it prints the album name above and larger than the artist name, which just messes with my brain. Also, it never misses an opportunity to remind me how great my life would be if I upgrade to the Gold version. MediaMonkey also handles MTP sync fine, and it claims support for syncing with iPods and MSC devices too.

Foobar2000 - I really like this program and at first I thought it would be my favorite. But I can't seem to get it to show a playlist pane that's separate from my main library view. (Same problem with iTunes.) Nice, simple, clean UI though. And I haven't been able to get any skins working... they're all really difficult to install due to requiring different versions of foobar and various libraries, etc. Also, no MTP sync. But I like where this program is going. Also, I'm sure when I get around to trying out some plugins, I'll be able to do some more stuff with it.

Songbird also looks promising, although the UI borrows a little too heavily from iTunes for my taste. And I didn't find any "feathers" (skins/color themes) that I liked. But this program is still young and I think it will evolve.

Zune Software - I love how they're getting creative with the UI, but this is just wayyyy too resource intensive for general-purpose use for me. Zune wins the looks contest though, especially when you go to the "now playing" screen with the big collage of album art.

iTunes - Very clean and crisp UI. I have to make sure to tell it not to make a separate copy of all my files... hello, I don't have an extra 30 gb of disk space for this program! Also doesn't have a separate playlist pane... you have to go back and forth between main library and playlist like in foobar. Low CPU usage though, that's nice. AAC support is nice, but no support for WMA files (without converting them). Supports iPods but not MTP devices.

 

Hmm I like Winamp except for the fact that I can't run Google talk at the same time, so iTunes wins for me

 

I use folders and just drag the whole folder into MPC and play it...quick and easy.

 

I use the Zune software, but it isn't my favorite. I liked iTunes a lot more. I liked sorting my music by playcount and having smart playlists for recently played and recently added. The Zune auto playlists don't do recently played.

 

Hey I just found this new media manager/player... Teen Spirit.

If you want something lightweight, fast, and fun, definitely check this out (no matter what your age).

http://www.snapfiles.com/goto.php?id=110028&t=87463528&d=7129926&gourl=/get/teenspirit.html

My only major criticism is that the UI has a slightly amateurish feel to it... like the icons and stuff... they're not bad or anything, they just have a little bit of a "freeware" look to them... other than that, it's awesome. No device sync, but most other features are there, including search, tag editing, playlists, random/shuffle play, mini-player... it fetches art and lyrics off the net too. Kind of reminds me of foobar, but more features are present out of the box. Low CPU and memory usage. Really cool.

Only a 3-band equalizer though... what's up with that? Fortunately I don't use the equalizer much anyway.

I may even make this my new bread-and-butter player... except when I need to sync with my portable... because it doesn't do that... yet.

 

winamp looks awesome, works very well, and i'm too lazy to switch so its my player.

 

I used to use iTunes on my previous notebook, but I ditched it because it's such a memory hog. Unfortunately, I still prefer the UI on iTunes, but I am now using Winamp. Much less memory usage and still a solid player.

 

Windows media player is very nice and reliable.

 

i have used winamp and WMP for years now and finally installed itunes.. somehow i just prefer the quality of the music from itunes soo im using itunes right now and got rid of winamp.

 

foobar2000!!! love the low resources

 

Foobar for general listening, WMP 11 for syncing and sorting

 

I recently downloaded and crashed within 5 minutes so I'll continue to use WMP11.

 

iTunes--aesthetically pleasing, intuitive design; sole complaint would be lack of FLAC support.