What's the best music playing/media library software?

Brolo

Windows media player is stupidly slow.

Itunes is too bloaty, crashes too often, and I hate the look/feel/slowness of it.

Winamp's slowly devolved into a pile of crap, adding in more useless crap like a built-in web browser.

So what's the best media player out there? I've heard tell of MediaMonkey, which I dismissed because it sounded like spyware but apparently it's worthwhile. What are you guys using on your PCs?

LittleBoots

Foobar

or Amarok in linux.

archonwarp

I'm actually pretty happy with the Zune software. If you're at a part or something, it's pretty cool, as it throws up some cool visuals when left idle. It's kind of bloated, and it takes a few seconds to boot up, even on faster machines.

capable heart

deleted

Rigor Mortis

IMO Foobar2000 no questions asked.

Beck

If iTunes isn't your thing, go for Foobar.

Dark Shroud

WMP11 gets slow if you have a very large library. WMP12 isn't out yet, but it's a big improvement in the speed area. The Zune software is free and does a very good job. If you don't want to go MS then Foobar2000 is your only other quality choice.

iTunes on Windows is hell.

Mike Danger

LittleBoots wrote: »

Foobar

Of course, if playing with plugins isn't your bag, MusikCube is also pretty good as I recall. I've heard some rumblings about Songbird, but I haven't had the opportunity to test it myself.

Matt!

Media Monkey!

It's basically the same thing as iTunes and has podcasting built in, which was perfect for me.

UncleSporky

I use Winamp and disable everything but the player on first install. And then tweak the settings further to disable automatic updates and junk. It runs just like it used to and works great.

DjCalvin

I Second MediaMonkey.

Strangely, I haven't ditched i-tunes completely though.

DjCalvin

Mike Danger wrote: »

I've heard some rumblings about Songbird, but I haven't had the opportunity to test it myself.

Songbird was a great Idea, had great potential.. that they completely ruined with memory leaks.
Thing runs slow as all hell with a large library. Unbearably slow..

Airan

Foobar, but you gotta do a bit of work if you want it to look good. I think there's some skin packages out there now though.

I'm a lazy bastard, so I just install ColumnsUI onto Foobar and be done with it

Rotting Meat

Can anyone recommend a good skin package with standard use items? I like the playlist management ability of Foobar, but at the moment mine is extremely ugly.

Cyvros

If I really liked copy/pasting, I'd lime every suggestion for foobar2000. Definitely foobar. Definitely.

Tofystedeth

I've never been able to dig any other players library organization better than MusicMatch's, but I got tired of MM deciding to stop working after a year repeatedly. I use foobar now and while it's pretty awesome (I especially love simply selecting tracks to get a playlist quickly) I don't like how it splits out things into their own sublist based on secondary tags. Like, if I have albums 1, 2, and 3. And each album has several artists on it, it will show it like

+album 1[artist A]
+album 1[artist b]
+album 1[artist c]
+album 2[artist d]
+album 2[artist e]
etc.

instead of just listing the albums. I've tried going into the display and sorting preferences and haven't found a way to get it to do what I want. Other than that its pretty nifty.

Frem

Tofystedeth wrote: »

I've never been able to dig any other players library organization better than MusicMatch's, but I got tired of MM deciding to stop working after a year repeatedly. I use foobar now and while it's pretty awesome (I especially love simply selecting tracks to get a playlist quickly) I don't like how it splits out things into their own sublist based on secondary tags. Like, if I have albums 1, 2, and 3. And each album has several artists on it, it will show it like

+album 1[artist A]
+album 1[artist b]
+album 1[artist c]
+album 2[artist d]
+album 2[artist e]
etc.

instead of just listing the albums. I've tried going into the display and sorting preferences and haven't found a way to get it to do what I want. Other than that its pretty nifty.

This. I have a lot of music from OCRemix, and it bugs me how every media player out there bloats out my artist list with lots of 1 song artists. I've taken to mass-editing tags, but it would be really nifty if foobar could handle it.

corky842

Frem wrote: »

This. I have a lot of music from OCRemix, and it bugs me how every media player out there bloats out my artist list with lots of 1 song artists. I've taken to mass-editing tags, but it would be really nifty if foobar could handle it.

I think you can set an "album artist" and then change the library viewer to sort by "album artist" then "track artist"

LoneIgadzra

I rip and tag in iTunes, play in foobar even though it's a little less convenient to browse/make playlists sometimes. Winamp is worse though since there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it's UI, and most skins seem to take the approach "how can we make everything as impossible to click as possible?"

RandomEngy

MediaMonkey is most definitely not spyware and is the best music library app. Foobar2000 is nice but does not have ratings, smart playlists, built-in syncing to mp3 players, folder watching, mass tag editing or a way to embed album art into the files.

It's fast, stable, and not too hoggish when it comes to memory.

Dírhael

RandomEngy wrote: »

Foobar2000 is nice but does not ...

RandomEngy wrote: »

have ratings

Yes it does, just download the offical "Playback Statistics" component.

RandomEngy wrote: »

smart playlists

Yes it does, it's just called auto-playlists. For instance, here's one of the many that I'm using:

(%last_played% DURING LAST WEEK) AND (%rating% GREATER 0) SORT DESCENDING BY %last_played%

It automatically adds any song that I've played and rated 1 or higher during the last week.

RandomEngy wrote: »

built-in syncing to mp3 players

Depends on what you mean by that, because you can send/convert any playlist/file to whatever folder/device you'd like as long as it has a drive letter. How useful this is does of course depend on what device you're using, but for me it does the job well enough.

RandomEngy wrote: »

folder watching

Actually, starting with the 0.9.6 betas it does have this feature.

RandomEngy wrote: »

mass tag editing

Of course it has this and have had it for as long as I can remember.

RandomEngy wrote: »

embed album art into the files.

True, out of the box all it does is read the embedded artwork.

RandomEngy

Well it's changed since I've last used it.

Dìrhael wrote: »

Yes it does, just download the offical "Playback Statistics" component.

Do the ratings stick with the files? Do they sync to your device?

Yes it does, it's just called auto-playlists. For instance, here's one of the many that I'm using:

(%last_played% DURING LAST WEEK) AND (%rating% GREATER 0) SORT DESCENDING BY %last_played%

It automatically adds any song that I've played and rated 1 or higher during the last week.

Do the playlists sync to your mp3 player? Does it have a UI that lets you make smart playlists without needing to learn arbitrary syntax?

Depends on what you mean by that, because you can send/convert any playlist/file to whatever folder/device you'd like as long as it has a drive letter. How useful this is does of course depend on what device you're using, but for me it does the job well enough.

iPods, for example do not have simple drive-letter file copy syncing.

RandomEngy wrote: »

mass tag editing

Of course it has this and have had it for as long as I can remember.

It did not have it last time I used it.

Anyway I like MediaMonkey because it gives you everything out of the box. All of its settings and your library information and everything are in a .sqlite database file, and you can just back that up and plop it down after a reformat, and everything is back the way you left it, no components, no hassle. Additionally, you can restore your skin/UI layout with a single .msz file. Have they changed skinning too, or do you still need to download a million fonts and components and copy a bunch of sections of text to get a certain layout and look?

taliosfalcon

I've never really understood all the love foobar gets, yeah it can look as good, and have as many features as other players do on their base install if you spend a bunch of time customizing it..but the only real advantage it has is a slightly smaller footprint, which doesn't matter if you're using anything faster than a pentium 2 anyway. My vote goes to either mediamonkey or winamp (unchecking all the extra crap during install of course).

One problem I have is that there doesn't seem to be anything but itunes for my mac laptop, and I hate pretty much everything about itunes =( The variety of pc playback software has spoiled me I suppose

Dírhael

@RandomEngy: Yes, it you want them to [the ratings]. You can choose to either have your files tagged with the ratings, or just leave the ratings in the foobar database.

As for syncing playlists to your mp3 player, yes you can but again it depends on your player. There are also iPod components if you need that.

Also, mass tagging is something foobar2000 have had for years so it probably was there when you last used it though you may not have noticed it as foobar2000 tends to do things differently compared to other players. As for using different themes/layouts, yes it's a lot easier than it was. On first time installations, it will pop up with a dialog offering you several different choices and you can now also build a new layout by just pasting panels where you want them. Downloadable single-file themes are also an option if you're using the default UI component.

Should you wish to backup your library it's a single database file (or 2 if you want to keep ratings and other stats in the DB) just like MM.

It's not a player for everyone, and I can see MM being the better choice for many people (I own a lifetime license for it, but don't really use it any longer). Was just pointing out that it does have several of the features you mentioned.