Best music players

[GravityWave]

Will either of those programs organize your music like iTunes does? If I dump an album into a playlist, it is quite annoying that it won't automatically order the songs correctly.

I don't use iTunes, but I assume you mean track order? In Winamp's Media Library click on the Track # column heading to sort the tracks in the correct order then ctrl+a to select all of them, ctrl+c to copy them then go to the Playlist window and ctrl+v to drop them in there wherever you want. You can also sort the Playlist by title or filename by going Misc>>>Sort in the Playlist window.

I only use Playlists for compilations, if you just want to play an album double click on it in the Media Library and the entire album will be copied to the Playlist window (replacing whatever is there) and automatically played (you might need to set Winamp to sort them all by track first, as above).

 

[Grisu]

I am a fan of MediaMonkey myself.

MediaMonkey's pretty cool, so cool in fact that I'm considering getting the full version...though ironically, I don't use it to actually listen to my music, just to manage it

to listen I ususally use winamp...never liked WMP myself, though I can't say exactly why.

 

[Aramazd]

MediaMonkey's pretty cool, so cool in fact that I'm considering getting the full version...though ironically, I don't use it to actually listen to my music, just to manage it

I use MediaMonkey to manage music, but since I find myself in there a lot, I figure I might as well just listen in there instead of launching a new app.

to listen I ususally use winamp...never liked WMP myself, though I can't say exactly why.

I don't like winamp, I think the UI sucks. WMP is fine, although it lacks the ability to play a lot of codecs without downloading directshow filters.

 

[Macha]

iTunes is the worst piece of crapware ever produced. Requiring you to use this to use your iPod is worse than MS bundling IE with windows.

Now I'll make my suggestion before the Apple flameboys flame the living daylights out of me. Use Windows Media Player (this is the one I use). Or that one that comes with KDE which I can never remember the name of(EDIT: amarok). Apparently Winamp is quite good aswell but I've never used that so I can't comment.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

You mean Amarok?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

For videos, I always use VLC Media Player.

I've been messing around in Songbird -- it's cool, although it's still in development. It's gonna be really great once more features are added.

 

[kuukkeli]

For videos, I always use VLC Media Player.

Try a player that can use ffdshow (like Media Player Classic). It requires little work to tune but the result is way better picture quality than VLC (haven't tried VLC in a long time so there might have been some improvements to it too). With Linux I'm in MPlayer bandwagon.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

For videos, I always use VLC Media Player.

I've been messing around in Songbird -- it's cool, although it's still in development. It's gonna be really great once more features are added.

While it is still in development, it shouldnt be an 'although'. Its on version 1.0.0 so its definitely not a beta product anymore ( or alpha, I remember it when it was still alpha release 1 - a different...well, it wasnt even a beast ).

It already has plenty of addons and skins and has most of the functionality anyone could want out of a media player ( Even iPod syncing through an addon). So please, dont make it sound like its just a little toy now that can be improved.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Try a player that can use ffdshow (like Media Player Classic). It requires little work to tune but the result is way better picture quality than VLC (haven't tried VLC in a long time so there might have been some improvements to it too). With Linux I'm in MPlayer bandwagon.

I also have ffdshow (I know cos it always seems to be in my system tray when I'm editing videos with various programs or testing them in Winamp) and I haven't noticed any differences. I use Winamp for testing to see if the encoding worked properly since VLC can play broken files.

 

[El Koeno]

It looks good now - I should have kept track of this one!
Foobar still has an interface that is a bit... lacking. Even more so that VLC used to.

They have considerably improved the default UI though. It's actually useable right out of the box (though the Facets plug-in makes it a lot better).

Winamp Lite also works for me. I've got all my music ordered in directories, so I don't really need a player that has a library.