Suggest a Windows all-purpose audio player/editor

[bvanoudtshoorn]

You know, all of these difficulties would just dissolve away if you all realised the XMPlay is very inferior to Foobar2000.  :wink:

Seriously, though, I personally like Foobar. Others like XMPlay. I think that the two players serve two very different markets. I like to have an extremely organised music library, and I found that XMPlay's library management simply wasn't powerful enough for me, whereas Foobar's has all the power I could ever want (I mean, I think you can even use regular expressions for searching/generating automatic playlists!). On the other hand, XMPlay excels at playing MODs. (Which I hardly ever listen to, and when I do, it's generally in OpenMPT or the original tracker.)

So, to choose a player, you have to decide on the features you want in it. Features like:

• Powerful music management [F][W]
• Accurate mod playback [X]
• Highly extensible [F]
• Pretty [X][W][M]
• Utilitarian [F]
• On screen display [F][W]
• Accepts keyboard control [F][W][M]
• Free [F][X][W][M]
• Accurate MP3, OGG, WMA, (anything!) playback [F][M][X][W]
• Replay gain [F][W]
  \-• Calculated [F][W]
  \-• Applied to each track [F][W]
  \-• Applied to each album [F]
  \-• Applied to each artist [F]

[F] Foobar2000
[X] XMPlay
[W] Winamp
[M] Windows Media Player


Now, this is just a quick list of my own devising... Everyone else, feel free to add to it. Try to be objective, though. From this list, I objectively choose Foobar -- note that I probably tended to include things that were relevant to me, and I've already chosen Foobar, so naturally it'll score well.

[LPChip]

Although XMPlay still lacks a simple option to 'open file'.

Huh? Are you using the latest version? I have an Open and Add button in my XMPlay. The difference is that the open button clears the current playlist, while the add doesn't. Right mouse on either will open a directory instead of a selection of files.


Oh and Barry, your list there is wrong. XMPlay has some of the features that you say it hasn't, like shotkey support that can be configured to your needs and even accepts global keys to multimedia keys. It also has a song library with search feature. And also it has a replay gain with automatic volume adjusting. So here's my list with what XMPlay supports.

• Powerful music management. I have no idea with what you mean here, but I think xmplay has it too. [X]
• Accurate mod playback [X]
• Highly extensible [X]
• Pretty [X]
• Utilitarian. Wha?
• On screen display. You can configure XMPlay to show info bubles which even work in full screen, so this is an OSD [X]
• Skin support [X]
• Has support for DirectX and ASIO output [X]
• Create your own skins easilly [X]
• Has visualisations [X]
 \-• Can show you a mod-pattern display visualisation [X]
• Is very very stable [X]
• Has a small memory footprint [X]
• Loads quickly(both songs and the program itself) [X]
• Gapless output [X]
• Is portable [X]
• Accepts keyboard control. Yes, even the best I've seen, highly customisable. [X]
• Free [X]
• Accurate MP3, OGG, WMA, (anything!) playback [X]
• Replay gain. Yes, XMPlay has this too. [X]
  \-• Calculated I don't know with what you mean with this, but it has an automatic mode.
  \-• Applied to each track [X]
  \-• Applied to each album [X]
  \-• Applied to each artist
  \-• Optional reset on new track [X]

[X] XMPlay

There, how's that? I also added quite some options for XMPlay.

[Sam_Zen]

the two players serve two very different markets. I like to have an extremely organised music library

Different using is the issue of course here. I don't need any organizing, I just want to play a single track, or a single album.

Are you using the latest version? I have an Open and Add button in my XMPlay.

Well, I just checked again and finally found the Open function. I was fooled by the 'Eject' look.
I don't care a bit about visualizations, but there's a nice cover-art plugin.
It displays the first bitmap in the album directory list.
This leads to the possibility for every track to have its own image, but then every track should be in its own subdir.

[bvanoudtshoorn]

Thanks for pointing all that out, LP. I should've mentioned that yes, FB2000 has ASIO etc. output.

Powerful music management: Basically, I mean the ability to organise music however you want, and recall music in really powerful ways. For example, being able to have a playlist automatically generated which includes songs which you haven't listened to for three months which you've listened to more than ten times, are in the genres 'dance', 'techno', or 'bluegrass' and which were written in the last three years.

Calculated replay gain means that it has the ability to analyse your music files and tag them with replay gain info, which can be used by other apps if you like. You can configure FB2000 to perform this calculation for each track individually, for all of the tracks in an album, for all an artist's tracks, and so on.

As for the rest of them -- FB does it all. Perhaps its downfall is its themeability -- unless you use a different UI library, it's not gonna be pretty. On the other hand, the default UI system is probably one of the most flexible I've seen in any app -- I can literally create components (tabs, panels, toolbars) wherever I like, and populate them with whatever kind of control I like (text, visualisation, various library views, playlist views, file system views, info views, coverart, lyrics, last.fm, console, whatever).

Anyway -- you gotta use what's right for you. It's all a rich tapestry.

[Saga Musix]

accurate mod playback is the only thing i need. therefore... guess which player is the best!

[LPChip]

So basically the conclusion is when you're having a difficult time to choose between Foobar and XMplay:







Get Windows Media player.

[psishock]

accurate mod playback is the only thing i need. therefore... guess which player is the best!

Modplug?

[Saga Musix]

first of all, i don't listen to mods only, so this doesn't work out. furthermore, modplug is definitely not the best player. It's far from that.

[psishock]

just kiddin' Jojo :luvvv:
XMplay is cool enough atm, foobar2000 seems a bit overwhelming for me. Also i haven't got any special problems with Winamp, its just starter slower than the average player because the heavy number of integrated features.

[Sam_Zen]

Yep, consumer favorites nearly always have a heavy number of integrated features. Which I don't need.

I like to admit, that, if my search for an alternative player had led me to Foobar first, instead of XMPlay,
I may have been stuck with that, exploring and learning the options, so maybe now would have been in favorite of Foobar.

I just finally got my new system right again to reproduce a discrete four channel output (excited!), and XMPlay does fine.
Multichannel WAV, OGG or FLAC are played correctly.

[JimmyJ]

For all my non-module music I use Foobar2000, and for my modules I use XMPlay now, having switched from Modplug player because of an annoying issue which started up.

[jikoo]

Do you know BZR Player ? It knows many module file formats.




More players on Woolyss Tracking in the topic Play "exotic" modules

Else, I use mainly Winamp and its plugins. But XMplay (and its plugins) is really excellent too !

On my Ubuntu, I use Audacious and UADE (150 music formats). The best ! ...like Deliplayer ! :shock:
.

[Saga Musix]

The sound engine is based on FMOD.

Throw that away, quickly! :O FMOD does neither play "a lot of module formats", nor does it play them well.


EDIT: LEETNESS! WOOTNESS! POST #1337!!!! :cheers:  :cheers:  :cheers:  :smile_:  :gunman1:  :lal:

[jikoo]

Sure, FMOD doesn't know many formats. But BZR Player knows more, specially "exotic" formats. Test it !

[psishock]

awwww, Jojo you're so leet :welldone:
here, lemme give you a friendly hug for the #1337 :cute: