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Both are just a joke comparing to iTunes.

iTunes is a joke, especially on Windows. Slow, bloated, and does nothing useful. Winamp is alright. You want foobar2000, which is BSD-licensed.

Omitting the ones that have been well-referenced by other posters:

• ConText
• Media Player Classic
• VideoLAN
• Gordian Knot (note: included DivX 5.x codec can be installed in ad-free mode, but encoding is restricted)
• Foobar2000

More to come as I think of them.

Foobar2000 (audio player)
Miranda (instant messenger)
PuTTY (telnet/ssh client. but if you didn't know _that_, then you really have no business being here.) :P

My audio player knows how to transcode between arbitary formats, amongst plenty of other things. Just select the tracks you want converting, right click, select Convert, select the format, select the destination; if your player doesn't have similar functionality perhaps you should consider finding a better player?

Have you tried foobar2000 yet? It supports many emulated formats and has an archive reader (ZIP, 7-ZIP, GZIP and RAR).

After a little tweaking, foobar is great!

Current version is 0.8.3

http://www.foobar2000.org/download.html

Winamp actualy copied that feature from foobar2000.

for me. Once I tried foobar2000 there was no going back.

Features
* Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player
* Audio formats supported "out-of-the-box": WAV, AIFF, VOC, AU, SND, Ogg Vorbis, MPC, MP2, MP3, MPEG-4 AAC
* Audio formats supported through official addons: FLAC, OggFLAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Speex, CDDA, TFMX, SPC, various MOD types; extraction on-the-fly from RAR, 7-ZIP & ZIP archives
* Full Unicode support on Windows NT
* ReplayGain support
* Low memory footprint, efficient handling of really large playlists
* Advanced file info processing capabilities (generic file info box and masstagger)
* Highly customizable playlist display
* Customizable keyboard shortcuts
* Most of standard components are opensourced under BSD license (source included with the SDK)

If you've ever tried writing a plugin for Winamp you'll fall in love with the fb2k SDK, its like heaven compared to the other player. ;-)

It seriously matters because not all changes someone is making will sound consistantly better across the board, just as one EQ setting may not work for every album in one's collection. This *still* is the responsibility of the DSP chain and every decent player out there at least has an EQ if it matters enough to you. Personally, I find to have met every single possible requirement I could ever need in that department, not to mention many other playlist-centric features and scripting support as well as disgustingly low resource usage. However, I don't think it magically 'sounds better' than its competition.

Also, seeing as both XMMS and WinAMP are both using reference decoders that follow spec exactly, I find your claims to be entirely made of up placebo effect. What's more likely is that one mixer is louder than the other (Depending on which mixer is being used in Windows, this can be the case. Using KernelStreaming can seriously remove most questions such as this), which is another common way for users to make such assumptions.

If you were to use the diskwriting functions of both players on a test sample and compare them via a blind listening test program such as ABX and prove that one was better than the other with consistant, reproducable results then you'd have done a service to both program teams and likely allowed one to fix something incorrect. However, the burden of proof relies on yourself to prove such claims through science.

You mean that thing people used back before they had Foobar 2000?

Foobar2000 is the ultimate geek's toy. Bare-bones approach with a competent database engine, plug-in arhitecture with an already huge and growing number of useful plugins and all of the features you can wish for already inside.
The interface is the best there is, bar none - it supports multiple playlists and has the ability to script your own playlist view, integrates with freedb.org, has many (many) tag editors and whatnot - there is even an optional iTunes-like interface available as a plugin. Also, Milkdrop and most other Winamp vis plugins (even AVS) work perfectly through its foo_bacon wrapper.
Foobar2000 has been the best audio player for Windows for a year now - it's just that not many people noticed. And as an aside, it's written by Peter Pawlowski, of the Winamp plugin fame.

It can also play anything else you throw at it, except for DRM'd files. AND it's customisable as hell.

foobar2000 maybe?

Quote from their site:

Features:
* Audio formats supported "out-of-the-box": WAV, AIFF, VOC, AU, SND, Ogg Vorbis, MPC, MP2, MP3, MPEG-4 AAC
* Audio formats supported through official addons: FLAC, OggFLAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Speex, CDDA, TFMX, SPC, various MOD types; extraction on-the-fly from RAR, 7-ZIP & ZIP archives
* Full Unicode support on Windows NT
* ReplayGain support
* Low memory footprint, efficient handling of really large playlists
* Advanced file info processing capabilities (generic file info box and masstagger)
* Highly customizable playlist display
* Customizable keyboard shortcuts
* Most of standard components are opensourced under BSD license (source included with the SDK)

Foobar 2K (extra components)

Foobar 2K (extra components)

A couple years ago I was tired of Winamp seeming to eat a crapload of system resources and switched to Foobar 2000 and never looked back.

But Winamp was the first free gui audio player that I ever really enjoyed. I remember sending playlists to friends as a way to encourage them to download it. Thanks for helping to make computers cool, Nullsoft. You were great.

Foobar 2K

Foobar2000 (extra components)

Will more people be using foobar2000 now?

http://www.foobar2000.org/ ;)

Would have been a big deal... if everyone wasn't using Foobar 2000 instead.

If you're trying to set up OGG streaming, use jetCast or something for Winamp-- it works with Winamp5 just fine.

Winamp5 will also play OGG streams just fine-- but I personally use FooBar2000.

For the record, I cannot believe how good OGG vorbis sounds at just 64kbps VBR. Beats the pants off of 128kbps CBR MP3 for streaming.

"Why not rip with one program, like CDEx, and then play with another, like Winamp? Winamp (the full version) handles Ogg just fine, does your playlists, etc, etc."

Urgh, lemme recommend you a REAL player.
Foobar2000

It is not just for nerds, it is for audiophiles too!

And it is open source!

Foobar2000

Have you tried Foobar 2000(I would recommend the Special Install)?

It has excellent tagging capabilities, and more than a few useful plug-ins.

Their forum's quite useful as well.

I can also recommend foobar2000, which became my player of choice on windows. Contrary to iTunes, it plays everything (ogg, mpc, ape...). Contrary to Winamp, it painlessly manages huge (60+ GB) playlists, with a database with excellent searching capabilities, and a wonderful tagger. It's text based (no fancy graphic stuff), with scriptable display. The SDK allows 3rd party plugin development. For more information, and other high level audio info, check the Hydrogen Audio forum.

yes, i haven't RTFA so i trust you're not making this up. i'll just say, if he thinks WMP is that fantastic and controllable, who wants to be around when someone shows him foobar. i think his head just might explode.

If you want a good music player without skins, you should try FooBar2000.

Why are you geeks worried? Shouldn't you be using Foobar2000 anyway? It is about 2000 X better than winamp and packed with geek friendly features.

Foobar does
http://www.foobar2000.org/
Handy, simple, small, and will go straight to the system tray.

The foobar2000 mp3 player has normalization (it's called "ReplayGain"). I'm sure many other software products do too...

foobar2000 puts iTunes and Winamp5 to shame in memory footprint. Foobar2000 uses a tiny 2MB or memory with a 400 song playlist and while playing music. It also comes with the Mass Tagger plugin for ID3 tag editing.

There is also an iPod plugin for Foobar in development that will give you all of iTunes iPod functionality. Currently it only can read the iPod DB, but it is in development.

*glances at e:\music*

*glances at his copy of foobar2000*

Yup; data files tagged with metadata, and a database caching said metadata providing effecient searches, playlist creation, etc. Store your music on a samba share, import into foobar on the client, and you're 90% towards what you might possibly want. The other 10% can likely be achieved either by writing your own plugin or maybe using a third party one.

Failing that, well, at least most of foobar is BSD licensed; lots of code you can probably reuse :)

As far as I'm aware, iTunes is a fairly primitive burst ripper, and lacks things like reader and writer offset correction. EAC's Secure mode remains the most trustworthy ripping method, and it's easy enough to set up to automatically fetch data from FreeDB etc. It can also rip to arbitary formats, including command line encoders, so lossless wise you're not limited to the largely untested, unsupported and sub-par Apple Lossless (which I've already heard truncates samples in some circumstances) or WAV.

In terms of high quality, sure, AAC's not bad, but MusePack still consistantly beats it in listening tests, is faster to encode, and is fully open source. It's a true VBR codec too, and quite happy to scale up to half a Mbit when the music demands it; last I heard AAC was still limited to ABR.

As far as comparing the iPod to a 20 quid player, that was purely from a format support standpoint; I'm well aware that the iPod is likely to include higher quality components which will likely impact sound quality. It's just not much use if it doesn't actually play most of my music in the first place :)

Plus, I find iTunes' UI absolutely disgusting. My preffered player isn't exactly a looker, but at least that's just because it has conservative defaults, not because it's using some weird and extremely slow GUI library with next to zero configurability. Foobar more than beats iTunes in features; and it even has an iPod plugin ;)

I'm not going to criticise you for using iTunes or anything (it's got some decent features, slow and ugly as it is), but your use of different media players is just kind of silly, i think. You can use a single media player to play all of those video formats. Instead of installing the stupid QuickTime player, you could download the QuickTime Alternative codecs, which will allow you to play QuickTime files in any media player you want. I recommend Media Player Classic, but regular WMP will work just fine if you like. :)

As far as music goes, i'll again have to point out foobar2000. Very fast, lots and lots of features/plug-ins, and (i think) it's the best-looking music player for any platform. (my foobar <3)

Foobar 2000 for all your audio needs.
BSPlayer for all your video needs.
Koepi's codec pack for all your codec needs.

Taking a look at those screenshots and hearing the new features, I really don't think I'm going to be installing that s--t on my computer.

Is there a plain-jane alternative? Something like foobar, but which can play video? I use foobar because of its standard looking interface.

Sigh. I don't want storefronts in my software :-(

I agree that iTunes is bloated and doesn't behave well by default (at least in Windows). I agree that Winamp is way better than iTunes as a music player, etc, etc.

But I also believe that Justin Frankel was completely frustrated for not being able to take Winamp even further. Try foobar2000. Don't give up after you see the interface (most new users are scared by the absence of skins :-O ) Try using it for some days. Check some third-party plugins and some alternative formatting strings. And, even more important, its audio capabilities. It has built-in support for every major lossy audio format out there (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, AAC, etc) and also features ReplayGain, proper dither, supports all major tagging systems properly and it's completely customizable.

BTW, foobar2000 is developed by Peter Pawlowski that once worked for Nullsoft (Winamp's current default output plugins were made by him - check the about box). I guess he just got tired of Nullsoft/AOL corporate inertia.

OK, you have a point. But check VorbisHardware for hardware with Ogg Vorbis support. Also, though Lame did well, MP3 is known to have some limitations. But if you have to use MP3, experiment --alt-preset standard in Lame. It was made to offer very good sound quality in bitrates that average below 200 kbps in most cases.

Regarding the results... It's a bit surprising that this third party tuning/tweak of Vorbis did so well. Which is great and I think Xiph should think about incorporating this work on their official encoder as soon as possible, in order to take advantage of its potential. You may be surprised about the relative low performance of AAC. This is partially due to the fact that the chosen AAC encoder was a CBR only encoder (because it was the best AAC encoder at this bitrate on a previous test - Nero encoder is also a good one and offers VBR encoder). With a good implementation of VBR AAC, it should be possible to get a better performance.

While most of the tested codecs/formats showed good performance at 128 kbps, this test alone shows that none can give transparency ( transparency == unability to distinct from the original source for most people and under good conditions) at this bitrate, contrary to what many think. People who think this is important should demand higher quality files from famous online music services (like iTunes Music Store).

People interested in lossy audio encoding should also try Musepack (file extension .mpc). It is considered by many of the hydrogenaudio enthusiasts as the best format at medium/high bitrates, offering transparency with bitrates normally lower (with standard preset ~170 kbps, typical 142 ... 184 kbps) than what is possible with other formats/codecs. It's now open source (LGPL, iirc). Its biggest disadvantage is the lack of support in portable players (though decoding musepack is faster than decoding the other formats in this test). There are plugins for almost every software player and foobar2000 (which I consider the best one) has native support for it

• Official APEv2 Spec (written by Frank Klemm of MPC fame)
• Tag - sources include APEv2 reader/writer
• Apetag - *nix cmdline. APEv2 tagger
• fb2k SDK - includes reader/writer code (BSD-licensed)

foobar2000 uses APEv2 tags on MP3's by default; the standard's just as flexible (well, as much as anyone wants anyway), but, well, you just need to compare filesizes for their handlers; an ID3v2 reader/writer I saw was ~150k of code -- the APEv2 one was 15k. They're always at the end, but obviously since fb2k is the only player I'm aware of which supports it the appeal may be limited. You can at least mix them with ID3v1, which should be good enough for portables.

And before anyone goes off on one because it's non-standard, I'll point out that MP3 has *no* provision for metadata. ID3v1 and 2's are just as arbitary addons as APEv2; they're just older (and lamer, either in big limitations or extreme overcomplication).

I believe the recommended *standard* way of attaching metadata to an MP3 now is to put it in an MP4 container, which has it's own more sensible format. Again, I'm pretty sure foobar2000 (maybe with some plugin in the Special Installer) can put them in, and I think they should play on anything which knows about MP4. Fully reversable too.

Reasons to use FLAC:

• It's free and open; I'm not going to find my files are suddenly unplayable because developers are unable to support it properly. I think it's even part of fb2k's std_input array, meaning it's supported in a player who's installer is less than 800k (the bloated "special" one which will play just about anything and do just about anything to the resulting sound is a shade over 2MB).
• It's lossless; I can transcode to any lossy format I like for playback on a portable.. maybe I get a player that only does MP3, maybe I find one which can play back MusePack; either way I can choose to create a lossy file which is tuned to my portable usage (100kbps Vorbis might be a good one for portable use, but man that'll suck on my desktop). Additionally if FLAC were ever to become unusable (maybe someone finds a patent against it or so.. whatever), I can convert to any other lossless format and get the same benefits without worrying about losing anything. I like a futureproof music collection.
• It's lossless; even at high bitrates, lossy formats aren't perfect, especially MP3. I don't want to worry about compression artifacts or encoder bugs or what quality setting to use; lossless is an easy choice, with no quality tradeoffs. With 600GB+ of disk space I couldn't really care less about the 4x increase in size.
• It's robust; I've lost track of the number of MP3's I've seen with serious sync errors (bit errors, basically). Despite having more FLAC files, I'm yet to come across a corrupt one, even through the less official channels (in fact, I've yet to be able to buy a set of FLAC files complete with .PAR2's, .MD5's and .LOG files). Pirate FLAC files are usually of at least identical quality to a CD you've ripped yourself.. pirate MP3's are usually encoded using stupid settings using a badly configured burst ripper. No thanks.
• It's well supported; it even has hardware support, which bodes well for the next few generations of portable audio players (if you had a 100G+ player wouldn't you like to be able to play lossless files instead of faffing about with lossy stuff?)
• It's fast. I can encode and decode FLAC faster than most lossy formats, including low bitrate Vorbis files. Yes, this is a big deal when I'm waiting for an album to ReplayGain or transcoding to other formats; going from 1% CPU to 0.5% CPU during normal playback is the difference between decoding at 100x and decoding at 200x.
• It's well specified. I'll be impressed if you can point me at a document describing MP3, and even then you're not going to find any metadata standards with an official specification; ID3v[12] and co are unofficial addons, and they suck (ever seen the ID3v2 spec? A ID3v2 reader/writer can be easily twice the size of a complete decoder and metadata reader/writer for most sane formats).

> 2: Winamp
> http://www.winamp.com

You all seem to use winamp. Why not try foobar ?

Lean and mean UI, lightweight, many features. I installed it once, and never got back to winamp.

For the record, foobar2000 handles gapless playback by using sample-accurate seeking, even on MP3 files. This also makes playback from cuesheets and such better, since it can start from an exact sample inside an audio image file (i.e. one big WAV with a .cue indexing the tracks in it, possibly embedded in said image file's metadata).

However, because MP3 sucks, to do it for them it needs to brute-force decode the stream and count the resulting samples, not to mention handle such things as LAME headers and workarounds for bugs in encoders. I wouldn't hold my breath to see this in any other player.

1. Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition
   
2. Symantec Norton Internet Security
   
3. 7-zip
   
4. Miranda
   
5. The Bat!
   
6. Mozilla
   
7. EmEditor
   
8. MagicTweak
   
9. Ad Muncher (Never surf without it.)
   
10. foobar2000
    

It's interesting how Apple has chosen to enable two lossless codecs into 4.5. On the one hand, you can use iTunes to import your CD's into it's own Apple (potentially proprietary) lossless format, or you can now import losslessly encoded (or not) WMA files which iTunes converts to AAC.

(Thinking aloud) Prior to reading about 4.5 this morning, I was encoding my CD collection into a FLAC archive. Using foobar2000 I could then encode my FLAC collection to just about any other format, including AAC. Up until iTunes 4.5 however, there was no direct method of importing losslessly encoded formats (other than wav files). Importing WMA vs FLAC now makes this process at least one step easier - Windows Media Player's WMA tagging is also extremely easy. Using foobar2000, one can also transcode WMA files into virtually any other format as well. WMA arguably has more overall support than FLAC - at least as far as portables are concerned. I'm not saying I'll switch away from FLAC, but it may be worth investigating.

I find it very odd how a new version of iTunes has me reconsidering WMA as an option for archiving my CD collection, especially as their own lossless codec was released on the same day.

Instead of Trillian, I install GAIM for win32 (GPL).

Instead of WinRAR, I install 7-Zip (LGPL).

Instead of WinAMP, I install foobar2000 (BSD).

Instead of SmartFTP, I install FileZilla (GPL).

Instead of PowerDVD, I install VLC Media Player (GPL).

I really need to switch to GNU/Linux.

7zip lacks multi-part archiving with error recovery volumes, or any other kind of error recovery information, so I use WinRAR instead. You get what you pay for with WinRAR.

WinRAR
Ad Muncher
Opera
Foobar2000
Paint Shop Pro
the current Kazaa Lite variant of my choice
OO.o

That's all I ask of my Windows machine.

>That's why everyone has dumped Winamp for iTunes...

Actually, winamp is being dumped for foobar 2K

try foobar2000

Why would one want OGGs anyway?

• I haven't paid for an MP3 encoder, and I'm not going to play that game. (Yes, Thompson/Fraunhofer could theoretically pull a patent out of their portfolio that affects Vorbis, but they haven't yet)
• Foobar2000 and Opie-Player 2 are the players I use.