Media Player

Baby Eater

Im looking for a good music player that doesn't take up a lot of running power on my computer. Preferably id like one that plays only music because i dont watch videos that much and i'd think that the big black screen is just a waste.

Lep

Foobar2000 might be right up your alley although I have no personal experience with it.

Unknown

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leaf

I used to be all about the media players, but now I simply don't care, and use WMP, after all the others I used to like stopped being supported/updated whatever.

Unknown

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Zxerol

I second foobar2000. It's light, fast, and minimalist, yet quite powerful and extensible. The default interface is pretty fugly, but it gets the job done (and it can be customized to a pretty extreme degree, if you don't like it).

I once loaded it up with about 5,000 pieces of music in the playlist, and, while playing, it took up a third of the memory resources compared to an idling WMP. Pretty neat stuff.

Mordrack

foobar 2000 is exactly what you want. It's only drawback is that it takes quite a lot of fiddling around with its settings to make it look decent.

YesNoMu

Nothing wrong with WMP 11. Minimize it, and it puts the controls neatly in the taskbar.

The Cheese

Mordrack wrote:

foobar 2000 is exactly what you want. It's only drawback is that it takes quite a lot of fiddling around with its settings to make it look decent.

you can download premade configs pretty easy

but actually customizing it is hard to get into

Dírhael

The_Cheese wrote:

Mordrack wrote:

foobar 2000 is exactly what you want. It's only drawback is that it takes quite a lot of fiddling around with its settings to make it look decent.

you can download premade configs pretty easy

but actually customizing it is hard to get into

I don't really see the point in customizing it much. I ususally just queue all my music, configure global hotkeys for play/pause/stop/next/prev and one for bringing up the search dialogue, then just minimize the player to the tray.

The best thing about foobar besides the fact that it supports just about every single format you can throw at it, is replaygain. Why no other players have implemented this properly is beyond me, and one of the reasons I probably never will switch to another player. It also has great tagging tools, something I'm also missing in many other players.

RandomEngy

Yeah I'm going to support the Foobar2000 route. It plays all kinds of formats, is lightweight and you can easily change the key configuration right out of the box. This is important when you want spacebar to do play/pause.

Dracil

And another vote for Foobar2000. Been using it for years and never looked back. Winamp only functions as an alarm clock now via a plugin.

Narom

I approve of Foobar. The one customization I would really look into is getting the other skin, the columns GI I think it's called.

Krunch XP

YesNoMu wrote:

Nothing wrong with WMP 11. Minimize it, and it puts the controls neatly in the taskbar.

Indeed.

I am one to suggest Foobar, like the others, but I'm using WMP 11 and love it. It's quick, pretty and very functional right off the bat.

TheSonicRetard

mplayer is the greatest media player on the planet. It's not super-fantastic with just music, but it's still leagues above everything else.

And with video, it really excels.

Echo

Foobar

gneGne

Quintessential Player:
www.quinnware.com

Search for the Minima skin, you're set.

Still use winamp myself, hard to get used to new players :P

Baby Eater

thanks guys im looking at this foobar now and i just have to get it customalized and plug in my music.

Terrorbyte

Buy more RAM, download iTunes.

Zoolander

Why stop at RAM, just buy a whole new computer
To play MP3s

Anyway, I really like Billy for lightweight MP3ing

LoneIgadzra

I vote winamp. Mostly because my entire library is AAC, and apparently everyone else too lazy to support what is the official "sequel" to mp3.

Dracil

Foobar2000 supports AAC.

# Audio formats supported: MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA.
# Full unicode support.

Echo

Dracil wrote:

# Audio formats supported: MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA.

...and that's just out of the box. There are plugins for every format you can imagine.

Vegan

Terrorbyte wrote:

Buy more RAM, download iTunes.

I knew some smartass was going to suggest iTunes.

ZackSchilling

iTunes takes about 30MB of RAM on my machine. Not what I'd call lightweight by any means, but not terrible considering all it does. That said, I think we all know the OP does not want to be running iTunes.

I've only ever heard good things about FooBar2000.

PhilthePill

Speaking of media players, does anyone know if VLC and/or foobar support *.wv files? Lossless audio.

bbmartini

its already been said but:
Audio formats supported: MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA.

and many others are available though plugins.

also:

Echo

Now that's one sexy setup. Where do I get it?

bbmartini

here ya goooooooooo

you'll probably want to scroll though a few pages for anything else i might have said. also i updated a bit of the code here, and grab this which is mentioned a few posts below.

Echo

Thanks.

If there's anything I have against Foobar, it's how hard it is to install setups from other people -- usually they require some obsure plugin that takes 20 minutes to google and discover on some Japanese site. Foobar seems big in Japan for some reason.

edit: case in point, how to set up splitters. :P Why can't Foobar just save those settings so I don't have to look at a screenshot to see how to configure them for someone else's theme?

Mace1370

I've used winamp my whole life, but I would consider switching to foobar if it has dynamic media library filters. For example, in winamp you have your media library and a search bar. If I type the word "jazz" in the search bar it removes all entries that do not contain the word "jazz" in their ID3 tag. This makes it really easy for me to shuffle songs of a certain genre. Can foobar do this?

Dírhael

Mace1370 wrote:

I've used winamp my whole life, but I would consider switching to foobar if it has dynamic media library filters. For example, in winamp you have your media library and a search bar. If I type the word "jazz" in the search bar it removes all entries that do not contain the word "jazz" in their ID3 tag. This makes it really easy for me to shuffle songs of a certain genre. Can foobar do this?

Aye, it sure can

Echo

I guess most users want something other than an SQL-like syntax, though. :P

Kaenneth

Mace1370 wrote:

I've used winamp my whole life, but I would consider switching to foobar if it has dynamic media library filters. For example, in winamp you have your media library and a search bar. If I type the word "jazz" in the search bar it removes all entries that do not contain the word "jazz" in their ID3 tag. This makes it really easy for me to shuffle songs of a certain genre. Can foobar do this?

WMP11 does this.

RandomEngy

I'd like foobar skins better if you didn't have to go download 20 different components and copy 12 sections of code.

Mordrack

bbmartini wrote:

its already been said but:
Audio formats supported: MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA.

and many others are available though plugins.

also:

Mine's not that sexy, I'm somewhat of a minimalist.

Dírhael

Echo wrote:

I guess most users want something other than an SQL-like syntax, though. :P

That's the thing though, you usually just type in whatever you want to search for just like WinAMP & WMP etc., it's just that it also offers you the possiblity of using a sql-like syntax should you want it. Choices are a good thing, don't you think?

Akinos

Yeah, uh, foobar.

Lucky Cynic

I'd say the perfect program to use for MP3's that isn't system resource intensive would have to be the Zune marketplace as it is easy to use and nearly bug free.*


*totally not true, but Media player classic works fine for me just fine when I am crafting in DAoC and don't want to be lagging like a bitch.

SageinaRage

I use winamp, it's the program I"m most used to, and it does all the things I want - one of the things I like about it is the global hotkeys - so if I have music in the background while i'm playing guild wars or something, I just hit a couple keys and it goes to the next song without switching windows.

Note: I have no idea if any other players do this, but I know winamp does.

Zoolander

bbmartini wrote:

its already been said but:
Audio formats supported: MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA.

and many others are available though plugins.

also:

I did all that, but I can't get the fancy green and orange bars to show up (relunaorange2.png and relunagreen.png). arrow.png doesn't show up either, though most of the other work, I think.

Never mind, figured it out. I needed to put the images folder in my Application Data.

Now my foobar looks awesome too! Thanks bbmartini.