Audio Player Review: Which is the best one?
Audio player is the software that is being launched on my PC hundreds times a day. The right choice of an audio player can cost you lots of time and effort. The two main reasons to launch and audio player: listen to music and sorting newly downloaded house stuff.
Let’s start from so-called ‘media-machines’ like iTunes and Windows Media Player.
iTunes – the ONLY advantage of this software for me personally is that it can download podcasts… and yeah, your iPod is almost dead without it. iTunes intends to add any track you play to its media library. That often leads to a mess. The window of the software is huge, and the software itself looks like ACDSee, but for music files and with the store embedded.
Yes, you can minimize the window, but you are not in control of your playlist since then.
Last thing to add is that it has mediocre skins support.
Recap: sorting your newly downloaded music with this is like piling potatoes with lawn-mower.
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Windows Media Player (WMP) – just like iTunes, it takes a long time to load and has a large window. The problem can be solved by minimizing the window and adding complementary skins. I think that audio playback was always just an additional function of Windows Media Player as it was originally targeted as video player. Did not ever see a person, who had WMP as a default for audio files.
Recap: sorting music? Only if you do not have other choice.
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Winamp (WINdows Advanced Media Player) – I still use 2.8 with the default skin!! It’s fast, simple and clean. It loads very fast and in its playlist it has nothing but the track that you have selected to play. Track navigation is perfect for going through a track fast. You can either use your mouse, or keyboard arrows.
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AIMP – one and the only competitor to Winamp. It even looks pretty much alike. AIMP has lots of customization options so you can configure it just the way you need it to be.
The very cool feaure of AIMP is how it is being minimized to tray!! Just look at this little beauty =)
You should definitely try minimizing it! It becomes little and thin, but has all the playback buttons, together with navigation. It will show you the track info on hangover and it has an option to copy the track that is currently playing to clipboard and then you can paste it in some separate folder! This is a very cool feature when you are listening to newly downloaded music in background, while being occupied by something else.
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=====Now briefly about some other quite good players:====
KMPlayer – unlike other players has a huge number of settings, images and sounds.
jetAudio – not just a player, rather a mediamachine, it has high-quality built-in audiocodecs. Maybe it is one of the best players for listening to music but not for sorting it. And yeah, the full version is not free.
Foobar2000 (by Piter Pavlovskyi – Winamp developer ) – has minimalistic interface, metadata support and high-quality audio playback. Theoretical maximum of sampling frequency and audio-out bit width excels the possibilities of professional audio equipment. It performs noise modeling and dithering for high-quality audio playback. Are you following me here? LOL Anyway, these functions are rather for audiophiles.
All the audio players above are free, so you can easily try them all and make your own decision. The last advice however will be to turn off any stereo expanders, equalizers or any other effects while selecting tracks for a party. You should hear the track as it is, to be sure it will sound the same in club. And yeah, buy yourself some good Studio Monitors =)
==========Want to read something else?==========
– A guide into house music blogs & forums.
– How to download house music with SoulSeek?