Whats a good program to listen to music on besides iTunes?

G

Gizmotron

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 23, 2011
Messages
145
Title says it all really. Been using iTunes for a while and been annoyed at the black white and silver mess on the screen. Is there anything else decent out there?
 
I am a fan of foobar2000

Out of the box it looks pretty cheesy, but there are some great skins and visual plugins out there

Capture-7.jpg
 
I handle organization in Media Monkey, or rather, MM handles it for me... Also use it for batch conversions from FLAC and album art tagging after rips (because I still buy CDs from my favorite bands), the party mode is pretty good too.

For every day playback I use foobar tho, cause of the skins and stuff.
 
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Foobar has the best quality playback imo. It is not the easiest to use but it is worth it if you care about sound quality.
 
Yeah, foobar2000. Its also good because you can install and run it off a USB, letting you use it on other computers without having to do anything special
 
Nice Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here, compslckr, that album kicks ass man. I think I'll try foobar2000. Can it play FLAC?
 
MediaMonkey. I have too many songs for VLC, Fubar or Winamp to handle well. MediaMonkey's sound quality is great too.
 
I find foobar2000 very easy to navigate a large collection with, once you figure out how it works. I can find a song in 50,000+ in a couple seconds tops.
 
I'm another for foobar2000. Supports plugins and fully customizable. Bit perfect playback and dolby compatible.
 
Seems like Fubar2000 has the best audio quality I've ever heard on a computer. It's just a bit harder to use.
 
I still like Winamp. Easy to use and has the iPod interface if you need it.
 
The player shouldn't have a whole lot to do with the quality of playback. The decoding libraries for FLAC, MP3, etc are fairly standardized so the output from there should be basically identical. The differences come after that, mainly in being able to bypass the Windows mixer to avoid resampling and various other horrible things that can happen to your audio between the decoder and your DAC.

If your audio player is using DirectSound as it's output, as opposed to WASPI (sp?) or Kernel Streaming (and others less common), then Windows will alter the sound (mixing others sounds in, changing volume, changing sample rate, etc) before it gets sent to your sound card, lowering the quality. Most decent audio players (FooBar, WinAmp, many others) provide the option to use WASPI or KS for output, though usually it needs to be specifically enabled as not all sound cards play nice this way. I am not sure if VLC does, I don't recall ever seeing an option for it.

Also, VLC is not really suited as an iTunes replacement, as it offers basically no library management whatsoever.
 
so im loving foobar but i have it on random and it doesnt seek to the song playing so when i hear a song i like i have to scroll to look for it. anyone know how to find the song playing in your library list in foobar?
 
Gizmotron said:
so im loving foobar but i have it on random and it doesnt seek to the song playing so when i hear a song i like i have to scroll to look for it. anyone know how to find the song playing in your library list in foobar?
Click to expand...

Alternatively, instead of turning on Cursor follows playback. You can double click the status area at the bottom of the window to move the playlist to the location of the currently playing song. The advantage being that the player never interrupts you if you're reading/looking at something in the playlist. The double click even works across tabs.

Another killer feature of foobar is full support of ReplayGain, including both application at playback:
Preferences->Playback
and a very slick built in ReplayGain scanner/tagger:
Highlight some songs->Right Click->ReplayGain->Scan selection as albums(by tags)

Scan all of your songs, and you'll spend much less time adjusting your playback volume.

Optimally, you'd scan your whole current collection to start. And then only scan new albums/tracks as you add them.
 
About a year ago I started using Media Monkey and I'm lovin it. It does everything from playing various codecs to allowing me to change tags & artwork on files.
 
stewartjm said:
Alternatively, instead of turning on Cursor follows playback. You can double click the status area at the bottom of the window to move the playlist to the location of the currently playing song. The advantage being that the player never interrupts you if you're reading/looking at something in the playlist. The double click even works across tabs.

Another killer feature of foobar is full support of ReplayGain, including both application at playback:
Preferences->Playback
and a very slick built in ReplayGain scanner/tagger:
Highlight some songs->Right Click->ReplayGain->Scan selection as albums(by tags)

Scan all of your songs, and you'll spend much less time adjusting your playback volume.

Optimally, you'd scan your whole current collection to start. And then only scan new albums/tracks as you add them.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tips. I am utilizing the double click method now. I checked and ReplayGain is on in the settings and source is on Album and it sounds great. Do I still have to scan my library?
 
Any player than can use ASIO, WASAPI, or Kernel streaming is good for playing music. So not iTunes since it cannot do any of them. Without support for one of these output modes you will not get bit-perfect playback.

Personally I choose Winamp which has plugins for all 3. And I just really like the way Winamp is laid out and how well it performs with very large libraries.
 
IDK about library management but I have all my music in folders and its well organized.

I just can't get over the name... Foobar.
 
Not to hijack the thread but... On a related note, any of you using a remote app on your Android smartphone with foobar and/or Media Monkey? I've seen several, been meaning to try foodroid or Tunes Remote but haven't gotten around to it... I saw another interesting one tonight, Mobile Mouse, it's more of a general PC remote/mouse app but it has program specific media controls too.

Ideally I want something that works over both BT and Wifi, and also displays the current track on the phone, playlist control would be a bonus.
 
Foobar is one of the best customizable media players out there. If you're willing to spend time to skin it to your liking, then you will love it.
 
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