Better Alternative to Winamp

[The_Engineer]

Do any of the suggestions mentioned allow for the library database (?) to be portable? I keep my music on a shared drive on a home computer (soon to move into windows home server... maybe) but I travel a great deal. When this happens, I simply copy the entire folder to my laptop the night before my flight. Because of this, I've never wanted to get too attached to a media manager that I couldn't pick up and plop onto my laptop along with the actual music files. If there's something along these lines (a program, a feature, a strategy) that could help me out, that would be amazing!

I've tried a few of the players listed there and they are good. Winamp seems ancient but I'm not sure exactly what's wrong with it, is it poorly written? I like media monkey enough that if it supported the above requirement (plus displaying lyrics during playback--huge for me) I'd buy the gold edition.

Do you usually have enough freespace to have the library in two places at once? If so you could experiment with software like SyncToy in order to synchronize the two libraries and software databases.

 

[sphinx99]

I do... I've assumed that would be the likely solution.

 

[grimreeferx09]

mediamonkey!

 

[The_Engineer]

I do... I've assumed that would be the likely solution.

Sadly Synchronization is a very complex issue when you start talking databases etc so there are not too many solutions out there. If you find a media player that offers this type of 'sync up with the master copy when i get home' ipod-esque service for the media library on your laptop then I'm interested as well but I haven't heard of anything that has built this function at all.

 

[bexamous]

Why not just keep all your music in the same location on every system... so you can copy everything around without issue?

Eg just run "subst M: C:\blahbalh/bblahbalhb/bah/music" on every systems. Then M:\ will always be your music folder, no matter where it is actually stored. Then in foobar for example just tell it your music collection is M:\.

Also when installing you can tell foobar to not use windows registry or anything like that... so all settings are stored in foobar's folder. You can then copy it around and everything will move just fine.

It would be best if there was an Rsync in Windows you could just copy over new or modified files. You're about to go on trip, run rsync to sync M: on both systems, ... you get back and you run rsync to sync laptop back to main system if you want.