[thomaspf]

Another vote for JRMC.

I like to browse my albums by cover art which works great in this program.

Great tagging support

Great mobile device support with on the fly transcoding

Very low CPU usage in playback mode

Bit transparent playback using ASIO

Support to drive multiple clients from a single server with full library UI

Multizone support, which I don't use right now but I might want to going forward

Support for uPnP rendering devices

Support for commercial directX or VST plugins

The built-in ripper works quite well in secure mode. The results coincide with what EAC gives you

Fast word wheel searches

Multi format conversion. I use a combination of APE and lossless WMA with on the fly conversion to FLAC for my portable

Cheers

Thomas

 

[Dedpoet]

Thanks for the playlist tips, jiiteepee. I hadn't thought about using parsing a dir listing into a playlist. As a unix command line junkie, I appreciate that for sure!

I grabbed MediaMonkey this afternoon and have been playing with it for a few hours. I like it quite a bit, though I'm only slowly warming up to the navigation tree. I'd like to be able to turn off some of the branches that I won't use, like "Rating" and "Classification". I'd also like a bit more flexibility in the data importing, but I've figured out some work-arounds. Namely, I only want to bring in FLAC files from my full CD's folder (which also has MP3 versions for my Zen) but I want everything from my singles folder. I got what I wanted by using 2 different imports and changing the filter. So far, so good.

 

[liRetro]

Previously:
I used to use iTunes for my library, but then I got dissatisified with having everything on one page. It works, but the interface feels heavy and slow, otherwise I like the CD import setup.

Currently:
I use winamp to playback at home because it seems to play back better than iTunes and is easy to configure.

I use Windows Media Player at work because Winamp seems to only work with the sonic engine on and then it tends to break up at the drop of a hat. The old version works 10x better, so it might be my crapy built in sound card.

What I Want:
I wish I could have the Windows Media Player library layout in Winamp. The filtering layout of the albums and artist filter on the left with sortable columned song lists on the right seems easier to use with the same results.

 

[slinger1182]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mojo Make some kind of usable media library out of it. I have about 12,000 MP3s (I know, I need to prune a bit probably) and want to access any given one quickly. They are all tagged properly, and WinAMP has a good media library for them. It's just that I like Japanese music, and WinAMP is not Unicode compatible.

Hmm, if you want find-as-you-type plugin, you can download this plugin.

EG: It can also do a whole lotta other stuff including sending the results to a newplaylist. Just fiddle around with it.

 

[Cjattwood]

foobar2000 is a great program, it is very confusing but it's got a great inteface, however I've found myself using Windows Media Player 11 these days, it's a major upgrade over 10 in my opinion, and it sounds just fine through my headphones and my speakers.

 

[slinger1182]

WMP11? I tried it about a month ago but, by God, it's a heavy software! Of course it's still beta but WMP10 is bloatware too.

 

[mojo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by slinger1182 Hmm, if you want find-as-you-type plugin, you can download this plugin. It can also do a whole lotta other stuff including sending the results to a newplaylist. Just fiddle around with it.

It's an interesting plug-in. The album list supports find-as-you-type which is also handy. I'm still working on foobar. One nice feature that no other software has is it's integration of ReplayGain for every format.

The next version of WinAMP is supposed to support Unicode... but I expect the plugins will take a while to catch up.

 

[StevieDvd]

Is it just me that finds it odd that people actually complain that it's a bit fiddly to change the look of Foobar to their exact requirements, when they cannot change much at all of another one player they recommend instead

 

[slinger1182]

Heh, Winamp has the most extensive collection of skins. Ever. Some of those absolutely rock!

 

[StevieDvd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by slinger1182 Heh, Winamp has the most extensive collection of skins. Ever. Some of those absolutely rock!

Indeed but the comment was not aimed at Winamp or anyone in particular - rather just an unguided missive.

 

[slinger1182]

Yep! I hear you. The way I see it, F2K basically caters to two categories of people. The absolute Newbies who just want sound coming out without intensive resource utilization and the absolute experts who can customize it until their fingers hurt. Kinda like being at the ends of a Bell-Curve.

Most people want their media players to be easy to learn and use. F2K loses this by a long way. One person I know refuses to use F2K simply because he doesn't want to type out the commands required to make dynamic playlists. He would rather give up 50 megs of RAM and have a process running perpetually in the background because it's easy to create smart playlists in iTunes. Go figure!

I, too, installed F2K four times and uninstalled it before finally making an effort to know it as well as I could and switching from Winamp.

 

[stefan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by thomaspf Another vote for JRMC. I like to browse my albums by cover art which works great in this program. Great tagging support Great mobile device support with on the fly transcoding Very low CPU usage in playback mode Bit transparent playback using ASIO Support to drive multiple clients from a single server with full library UI Multizone support, which I don't use right now but I might want to going forward Support for uPnP rendering devices Support for commercial directX or VST plugins The built-in ripper works quite well in secure mode. The results coincide with what EAC gives you Fast word wheel searches Multi format conversion. I use a combination of APE and lossless WMA with on the fly conversion to FLAC for my portable Cheers Thomas

Could not agree more. Being able to browse album cover art is fantastic, as well as customise the tree -- have yet to see another piece of software that is so intuitive. Well worth the asking price.
Will post a screenshot when I get the chance....

 

[hembergler]

I use my friend's configuration of foobar, which is someone from Hydrogen Audio's configuration. Works for me.

 

[mojo]

Can I just ask the Foobar users here how they deal with creating "on-the-fly" playlists. Say you just encoded/downloaded a few tracks and want to quickly listen to them to see if they are OK, without having to tag and file them away in your music library? What about if you just want to pick a few random tracks by different artists and make up a quick playlist?

I just can't see a good way of doing this at the moment, but maybe I'm missing something? In WinAMP, you have the playlist window, so you can just drag stuff from the media library or use the shell extension to queue it.