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The best music player for Windows?

ewgfewgf
edited March 2011 in Chit chat
Up until now, I've been double clicking on .mp3/.wma files in Windows Explorer to play them in WinAMP (or block selecting with SHIFT and then right click then "Enqueue in WinAMP" to queue a lot of songs) whenever I've wanted to play music whilst using Windows for anything else such as net browsing, word-processing, converting files, etc.

But now that I've finally put Windows 7 on my home PC, I thought I might as well move into the twenty-first century with my music playing on the PC too, so how do you play music on your PC when running other stuff on there too?

WinAMP is a great music player, but what do other players offer that WinAMP doesn't, or that they do better than WinAMP? I don't care about playback other than music (VLC is fine for films) but what players offer their own tables of all available files instead of relying on you to select the files from Windows Explorer (and yes, I do use playlists in WinAMP every so often, but I'm looking for a program that can list all music files, preferably according to any filter you can want (album, group, type, etc), but will also list everything (I mean everything) alphabetically). Oh, and I much prefer it to go by filename rather than the internal data of the .mp3/.wma file, as not all of them seem to contain the needed data, whereas everything is in the format [group name]_[songname].mp3, i.e. Beatles_Let it Be.mp3.

I'm not asking about very resource hungry players, as I want to be able to use it whilst converting files in the background (plus maybe other stuff at the same time), and I want it to work fine with other Windows processes, so nothing that hogs the whole screen and can't be minimized or sent to the background.

Thanks for any answers.


By the way, you know how I begin this post "Up until now"? I originally typed it as "Up to now", before correcting it, but I'm not so sure it is correct now, as people always say "Up to now", as do I. Yet I'm sure it's always written as "Up until now", which I believe is the correct English. Which is correct?
Post edited by ewgf on

Comments

  • guesserguesser
    edited March 2011
    what's wrong with winamp?

    I use winamp and vlc and have no problem with either.

    also, you do know you can just edit the mp3 tags right?
    My rubbish website including the redrawn Amstrad schematics and the Sinclair Wiki.
  • VampyreVampyre
    edited March 2011
    I don't bother putting my MP3's on the PC any more. I just use the free version of Spotify. Granted not all the tracks I own are on there but I'm willing to bet about 95% are.
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  • MrCheeseMrCheese
    edited March 2011
    You can press alt + L in winamp to bring up its media list, which is filterable and alphabetical sortable.

    I did try using songbird, but it doesn't even have a playlist which is an epic fail. What's so hard about having a list that you can drag stuff into and sort into a play order? Well, the songbird team seem to think it's well hard and prefer to add more innane functionality like tabbed views or millions of "auto play track that is similier to the currently playing track". Bah. so I went back to winamp.
  • ewgfewgf
    edited March 2011
    guesser wrote: »
    what's wrong with winamp?

    Nothing at all, but I thought it was time I used a player that would list all available songs, according to any filter I chose, rather than sort through Windows Explorer the long way.
    MrCheese wrote: »
    You can press alt + L in winamp to bring up its media list, which is filterable and alphabetical sortable.

    Oh. Maybe WinAMP does have that feature after all...

    But there are so many Windows media players available, that logically some of them must have good features that WinAMP lacks.

    I use winamp and vlc and have no problem with either.

    Nor me, but if there is better available, the it would be interesting to try them. Variety is one of the best things about the PC.

    also, you do know you can just edit the mp3 tags right?

    Yes, but it would be a lot of trouble which I'd rather avoid. Editing hundreds of files manually wouldn't be nice, and isn't necessary as just about every music file I have is names in the format [groupname]_song[name].mp3
  • MouseyMousey
    edited March 2011
    ewgf wrote: »
    I'm not asking about very resource hungry players
    That rules out iTunes, which, although bloated, does everything I want it to just fine.
    ewgf wrote: »
    By the way, you know how I begin this post "Up until now"? I originally typed it as "Up to now", before correcting it, but I'm not so sure it is correct now, as people always say "Up to now", as do I. Yet I'm sure it's always written as "Up until now", which I believe is the correct English. Which is correct?
    You crack me up ewgf. :)
  • fogfog
    edited March 2011
    I use VLC as winamp kept trying to set as default and it got ****ing annoying

    someone I know uses foobar , but a friend uses xbmc , but thats really for media centre pc

    http://www.filehippo.com/software/multimedia/players/
  • MrCheeseMrCheese
    edited March 2011
    fog wrote: »
    I use VLC as winamp kept trying to set as default and it got ****ing annoying

    You can stop winamp from file associations by ctrl + P then General Preferences --> File Types in the tree view, then untick "restore file associations at Winamp startup", then untick "Enable winamp agent"
  • AndyCAndyC
    edited March 2011
    I tend to use the Zune software these days, as it's a bit nicer than Media Player. I don't think it'll display filenames (I'm not aware of anything that still does that) but generally it'll just go off and magically find all the album details for you anyway - hand editing tags is such an old school way of doing things.
  • big_plumsbig_plums
    edited March 2011
    I use foobar2000, tis a fantastic music player, its highly configurable and has a decent library of plugins to add extra functionality.

    It can be a bit complicated at first but when its set up properly, it comes highly recommended.
  • richlrichl
    edited March 2011
    If you've installed one of the components like Media Library (can't quite remember off the top of my head which one it is) then you can select a whole load of tracks in WinAmp's playlist and then select "send to Auto-Tag" where it'll pretty much get most of the names correct. If you select them in batches from the same album then the success rate is nearly 100%.

    It uses something like a combination of filename and music signature to work out what a track is. It's clever as hell! It's identified stuff labelled as "Track01.mp3" in a folder called "Misc" just by scanning the file and then querying Gracenote. It's even identified specific mixes in a lot of cases.

    You can then tidy up filenames etc to be in whatever style you like using something like MP3Tag.

    But that's just how I do it! :)

    Also, Winamp has some great plugins like iZotope Ozone which can really improve the sound quality, especially on just regular PC speakers.
  • mel the bellmel the bell
    edited March 2011
    winamp pro (i use it to retag my idtags AND even to put stuff on my ipod)
    then media player classic
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  • robert@fmrobert@fm
    edited March 2011
    richl wrote: »
    If you've installed one of the components like Media Library (can't quite remember off the top of my head which one it is) then you can select a whole load of tracks in WinAmp's playlist and then select "send to Auto-Tag" where it'll pretty much get most of the names correct.

    The bog-standard Winamp install does that...
    I never make misteaks mistrakes misyales errurs — oh, sod it.
  • zx1zx1
    edited March 2011
    I used VLC for movies and music. It tends to recognise most file formats. I still occasionally use winamp but some files tended to crash on it.
    The trouble with tribbles is.......
  • richlrichl
    edited March 2011
    robert@fm wrote: »
    The bog-standard Winamp install does that...

    Yeah but if you don't choose the bog standard install and want to customise any of the settings when you install it then you might accidentally deselect the relevant component. There's a load of crap that I certainly didn't want it to install by default and it's not always 100% clear what some of it's actually for, other than to send info to WinAmp etc! :)

    I had to start again from scratch recently after putting a new hard drive in and installed the latest version, only to find out that Auto-Tag was "broken". Took me 10 minutes googling to find out that I had to uninstall and then reinstall with the relevant bit selected.

    Anyway, just trying to help :)
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