[Nikos]

I have used Musicmatch for years now, a little of Winamp here and there. Just started looking into MediaMonkey.

But which is the best for those who have tried all of them? Musicmatch is a little slow for me, but it does have excellent features in terms of Tagging/Album Art etc.....

What do you all think? Which is the best, and is their a better one not listed?

 

[Jubei]

Errrr ......... Foobar?

Seriously, can't beat Foobar as a music player / manager / tagger and much more with the appropriate plugins. It is fast, has small footprint and is capable of handling a large media library. It is also open to all sorts of tweaking - which can be a down side if you don't have time to read up and customize.

The bundled tagger is very good - in fact, since upgrading to Foobar 0.9.3 (and above), I haven't had the need to use another tagging software. But beware, Foobar 0.9.3 uses id3v2.4 as default, though the latest beta offers compatibility with id3v2.3.

Just upgraded to 0.9.4 Beta 2 last night.

 

[NiceCans]

IF you need a program that can handle hugh libraries and has a great deal of power . . . . . (NO, I was not gonna say foobar, I find it too difficult to set) the best I have tried IMO is J.River Media Center
I have tried to find an alternative, but nother has performed as well and had as much functionality.
Yes there is a learning curve (of course as it does so much) but it is not too steep and you can do alot right out of the box. After that it is a matter of how deep you wish to dig.

The downside: it costs $40.oo, if that is an issue, but it is worth the price.

 

[Jubei]

Quote:

Originally Posted by NiceCans I was not gonna say foobar, I find it too difficult to set

If you don't want to do tweaking then Foobar is not the way to go. Out of the box, the interface is stripped down and some find it ugly.

Personally, I used the standard interface for a few months before realizing how much you could do with various columns UI and plugin panels. This does take time and patience - and I'm no software developed, so scripting and such does not come natural. It requires alot of browsing through forums and modifying other's source codes to get what you want. Mine is still not half as elaborate as some hardcore Foobar users - but I like it plain

. And Foobar is designed for anal users who MUST have tracks, playlists and album lists displayed a very unique way.

I think Foobar fans enjoy the process of constant customization and upgrading. Anyway, I think customizing Foobar was and still is a very rewarding experience.

 

[hYdrociTy]

Using osx I use iTunes to play cd's that i made iso images of via disk utility. On macs you can just mount like 20 cds at once and not even notice it.

On a pc tho, if i try mounting 10 cds made with alcohol120 it just somehow eats up recources more than on osx,

so I would play lamed 192's with winamp w/ crossfeed plugins like Bauer stereophonic to binaural (bs2b) plugin, or HeadPlug MKII plugin.

 

[lionel marechal]

I use itunes and I love it.
WHen I compress, I always compress with lame in fubar.
I keep my file hierarchy on an exernal hardrive so I am not 'tied' to itunes if one day I want to change
I think itunes is the easiest to use, playlists features are great, and for classical for example, you can just type the name of the composer and you have the albums ready to browse yb genre/artist ( I use the interpret there)/albums
Lionel

 

[wanderman]

foobar2000 kernel stream ftw. the most powerful app for pc audio period.

 

[Jose Perez]

I've been using MediaMonkey for a few years now and love it. Easy to use and tons of useful features even in the free version.

 

[Ingo]

Winamp works best for me. I've tried Foobar2k and I really like the idea of it but for all practical purposes WinAmp is just as good, IMO. ASIO plugin for WinAmp out through my 1212m = good enough for me!

 

[gevorg]

Quote:

Originally Posted by NiceCans IF you need a program that can handle hugh libraries and has a great deal of power . . . . . (NO, I was not gonna say foobar, I find it too difficult to set) the best I have tried IMO is J.River Media Center I have tried to find an alternative, but nother has performed as well and had as much functionality.

I agree, J.River has the best interface, better than 100-hours-tweaked foobar.

And it has ASIO output too!

 

[stewtheking]

I use iTunes. It's just so easy to use and intuitive. I tried Foobar, but couldn't be bothered to spend days tweaking the interface and plug-ins and patches and nonsense like that.

Anyway, now iTunes 7 has gapless or near-gapless playback, then the advantages of foobar diminish.

 

[Laptopia]

Quote:

Originally Posted by stewtheking I tried Foobar, but couldn't be bothered to spend days tweaking the interface and plug-ins and patches and nonsense like that.

My experience with Foobar was quite different. I installed it, opened my FLAC files and it started playing them, beautifully. There are no moving pictures or other eye candy when just installed and run, but I don't care about that anyway.

Foobar also very easily converts my FLAC files to MP3 when I have the need to do so.

Go Foobar!

 

[Enverxis]

you can download preconfigured foobars off the Hydrogen Audio forums, all pretty and everything

 

[wanderman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gevorg I agree, J.River has the best interface, better than 100-hours-tweaked foobar. And it has ASIO output too!

A foobar interface is tweaked to your personal specifications so it will always be the best for personal applications. Learn an interface or make my own hmmm.

 

[wax4213]

I've been using foobar for a while now (probably about a year) and just got around to really making it look nicer. Took a few hours yesterday, but now I've got a cool looking player with album art. I also just installed iTunes 7, and man... it's so much smoother than my foobar setup. Only thing is, I don't want to manually drag all my album art into it, and I can't figure out how to make it find it for me. All my music was ripped into FLAC via EAC and then transcoded into LAME MP3 V2 via foobar. All my songs have little boxes next to the title/album/artist in iTunes, and it won't find any album art. Makes me sad

.