Software - Music Player

[aBe]

The other day I decided to put my trusted iBook G4 to a permanent 'sleep' mode due to its health condition and got meself a cheapo Win Laptop as a replacement instead. On the Mac, as far as audio player is concerned it has always been iTunes all the way. But when it comes to Windoze, I'm lost in options.

Tried the Winamp, VLC, WM Player and finally settled on Foobar 2000. I think it sounds a tad better than iTunes on Mac. Been using it for quite some time, until....

I stumbled upon Apollo 37zz

It's a no frills player. No skin, no album artwork support. FLAC, ALAC etc is enabled via plugins. I reckon this is the better music player of the lot.

Free download from here..

http://apollo.capacala.com/

[aBe]

In my exuberance I've made such a hasty conclusion..

I'm foreseeing that there'll be plethora of neat software to be discovered and evaluated in time to come. Speaking of which, I've unearthed a few more niceties from the net.

My Top of The Pops at this mo <sound wise according to my pair of woolly ears> :

1) Lilith Player (All format, but in Japanese)
2) Ultra Player (MP3 only )
3) JetAudio (All format)
4) Apollo 37zz (All format)
5) Foobar 2000 (All format)

[Themis]

It seems that Apollo has ceased development since 2006.

[Vincent Kars]

I don’t like minimalist media players.
Having a feature rich interface is half of the fun for me.
That's why I use J River MC15
However, if you want a minimalist one, here is one without any interface at all: http://andy-audioplayer.blogspot.com/

[ZebuTheOxen]

Try Foobar2000 - http://www.foobar2000.org/
with
ASIO4ALL - http://www.asio4all.com/

Depending on your soundcard software, the sound may still be influenced by preamp / EQ effects but will otherwise output a bit perfect audio stream.

[aBe]

Yeah..I'm already running the players with Asio, everything else being turned Off to be on the pure side.

GUI-less player? Wow, that's too hardcore for me to handle.
JetAudio is not that bad actually, it's a nice player with quite an elaborate interface.

Right now I'm still searching for FLAC plugins/support for Ultra Player, to no avail. Please do let me know if anyone had stumbled upon one.

http://www.ultraplayer.com/download/download.asp

[technobear]

xbmc is quite a polished player.

I found foobar required far too steep a learning curve in order to get it looking good and doing anything useful.

I found winamp to be only marginally better.

Media Monkey has a reasonable interface straight off but some of the interface is a bit obscure - particularly the handling of media players is a bit arcane but works fine once you figure it out.

I currently use EAC to rip CDs to WAV. Then I use Media Monkey to convert to FLAC and do the tagging (automatically from folder and file names) and add the album art.

I use a Transporter to play FLAC through the hifi.

In the future, I anticipate that DACs with asynchronous USB will overtake the Transporter and Caiman combination. I will then most likely choose xbmc as the player of choice.

[Batty]

+1 for media monkey, Liked it so much I bought the gold version.

[aBe]

I am not that too particular with interfaces or those extra bling features.
And don't really mind using a crappy looking software, with buttons that look as though they're designed by kids from kindies.

So long as it sounds great. It's fine then.
Sound quality is still my utmost consideration..

[aBe]

Got nothing to do, I decided to spent some time getting acquainted with those GUI-less or 'Memory Players'. Thanks to Vincent Kars, I guess I have finally found the light, the enlightened path..

Memory Players are obviously in their own league. Good FWIW, the Lilith Player trails in the sound department.

I could live without artworks, playlist etc for the sake of better music.
You guys might want to give them a try too - and be another convert just like yours truly.


1) StealthAudio Player with WASAPI
2) cPlay (WAV & FLAC only)
3) Lilith Player (All format, but in Japanese)
4) Ultra Player (MP3 only )
5) JetAudio (All format)