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While we're bashing iTunes, has anyone got a decent Windows alternative?

I've tried:

http://www.musikcube.com/ - Not updated since 2006, worked well on xp, crashes on vista + 7

http://amarok.kde.org/ - I use this on my laptop, but it's not windows compatible.

http://www.atunes.org/?page_id=6 - I currently use this, but it resets the repository occasionally, and I would be interested in other options.

What about musikcube? It only runs on Windows, though.

Wow,that is a lot of stuff to install just to be able to watch and listen. I have downloaded CCCP and will try it out on a test box though. But so far my customers haven't had any problems with Klite. Also giving out Klite with either Songbird or Musikcube depending on the PC seems to fill my customers needs. Musikcube does better on low resource machines and Songbird lets you update ID3 and Album Art. But with just those 2 installs I take care of all my customers A/V needs.

Does CCCP work on Win9X? Because I do run into Win9X machines occasionally and having a single pack that works on all is a plus. But like I said next time I fire up my test bed I will give CCCP a shot. Thanks for the info.

I used to be a diehard Winamp user, back from the pre v1 days to the early days of v5. It just got so slow and bloated that I eventually gave it up. Apparently Winamp users care more about how their player looks than how it sounds and responds.

Songbird sucks boulders through crazy straws. I tried it once before and have absolutely nothing positive to say about it.

foobar2000 is my main player. I've been using it to manage and play my music library/large playlists for the past few years and absolutely love it. It's fast, small memory/CPU footprint, supports almost every known audio format, has just about any audio/DSP feature/filter that can be named, ReplayGain support, nice masstagger/renamer and a highly customizable interface via its own internal scripting language, ColumnsUI or PanelsUI. In my opinion there is no other player that even comes close.

Xion is what I use for quick individual sound files or small playlists. It's quite a nice, fast loading little player.

XMPlay is decent, but is a little too slow loading once you get the file format and DSP plugins installed. It boasts "balls-on" accurate MOD/XM/etc playback, but really many other players can handle these formats just as accurately.

CoolPlayer is a neat little player, but doesn't really offer much, aside from being open source. It has limited format support and not many features.

uAmp has the distinction of being an x64 player, but offers little else. It's slow loading, supports even fewer formats than CoolPlayer and has doesn't even have rudimentary features that many other players have (ie. equalizer, noise shaping, gapless playback, etc).

1by1 is actually a pretty cool little player. It supports few file formats standalone, but does support Winamp input plugins for more. The main feature is its interface which directly uses directories instead of playlists.

coverJuke is basically a coverFlow clone. It has a slick OpenGL interface, supports a moderate number of file formats (can support more by using an external player) and is actively developed. Still considering that foobar2000 has a coverFlow-like plugin for it (if that's your thing), this player doesn't have much more than novelty value.

musikCube is a nice lightweight player with a respectable number of features. I think of it as foobar-lite, except it's really not any faster and has significantly less features and format support.

iTunes is slow, bloated, supports a laughably small number of formats and is lacking in features. I tried it once and it proceeded to start renaming my meticulously named, tagged and ordered music library on its own. Purged it from my system and had to use foobar2000 to repair the damage that it did. In short, it's complete crap.

Aqualung looks promising, but I haven't actually gotten around to trying it out.

I'm not sure about iPod support for any of these since I use a Creative Zen which acts as an external drive when plugged in, making it really easy to copy to/from.

You want a great free music player that has wicked features try Musikcube. The dynamic playlists and built in SQL backend ROCKS! I used to not touch anything but winamp, and then stumbled onto this thanks to shell extension city. The SQL backend makes it wicked fast for updating tags and files and if you prefer a winamp interface they have a plugin that'll give it to you. It is also licensed under BSD and they welcome input from the community. A really nice player from a really nice bunch of guys. It is for 2000 and XP,but the source files are on sourceforge and the developers designed it for easy porting to other systems.

I'm all about musikcube

Very lightweight, and fast, but unfortunately Windows only. Highly recommended though.

For those who have considered Foobar I recommend taking a look at http://www.musikcube.com/. Yeah it is for Windows, but I have a work machine that I have to deal with. Being open source(BSD)doesn't hurt.

MusikCube http://www.musikcube.com/

Uses a SQLlite database. Very fast itunes like search (i.e. By character) Small footprint (10mb at the minute, have been using it for 5 hours, over 3k songs in my collection)

Offers CD ripping using LAME, and has mp3 tagging

However, after using both for a period, I switched back to iTunes because it just works all-around better, and with the Multi-Plugin you can set it up with a foobar passthrough and through some mysterious setting drastically reduce the memory usage when it's minimized to the tray. If even this isn't enough for you, I'd say just man up and throw down a little under $70 to get another GB of memory. It's way more than iTunes will need and it will make your system snappier anyway.

I've been using musikCube. It's wicked fast, pretty small, and allows you to use SQL queries to build playlists, as well as having a iTunes/Winamp like music library viewer. It's also open source and has a good api for plugins.

I've had good luck with musikCube on my older machines light on RAM. Its small and nice. http://www.musikcube.com/

I love the library part of amarok. It was the playing I never could get to work.
Mp3, ogg vorbis and others were fine, but FLAC files would just produce silence. Bit of an inconvinience when my whole library is FLAC. Since xmms randomly stops playing on FLAC files as well, and rhythmbox (gstreamer) - don't get me started(i think this must be some conspiracy. I've invested more time in trying to get FLAC to work with various music players than I have during my 1,5 years of gentooing (no more...)).

MPD, otoh, plays everything fine :)
Besides, on Windows (work): itunes? wtf? give me musikcube any time.

Anyone know how it compares to musikCube?

http://www.musikcube.com/

http://www.musikcube.com/

Open source, and at Release Candidate 2.

Anyone interested in a free player (yes, it plays ogg vorbis etc) with no bloat and excellent search ability should try Musikcube.

Musikcube can mass tag flac files as well, it's similar to itunes in style.. Plays well with the iaudio x5 and other portable audio players.

http://musikcube.com/

I love Musikcube, best simple music/CD player for Windows. I wish they would port it to Linux, all the other media players on Linux feel bloated and unintuitive compared to Musikcube. No fancy, uneeded effects. Everything completely in one single window. Built-in search. Built-in CD Ripper. But it stays out of your way. All of this out of the box. I highly suggest anyone interested to try it. http://www.musikcube.com/ It is GPL too (or maybe it was BSD, don't remember, you'll have to check).

I guess that MusikCube fits better in the description of an "open source iTunes" counterpart.

Musikcube is an open source music library that does let you run SQL queries to generate playlists. It also supports plugins to support any file format, and for added functionality.

If you want even more control and actual SQL queries for dynamic playlists, check out MusikCube (http://www.musikcube.com/). The interface is decent, not quite as intuitive as iTunes but better than any other PC music manager / player I've found yet.

I agree, that's why if you need a media library but don't want the shit that goes with them generally, remember that winamp5 has a media library, and a pretty good at that.
Also musikcube looks very promising, i bet you'd like it. (It goes without all the skin / custom widgets everywhere madness, it uses standard controls and try to keep the interface out of the way). It's still young and i found it very slow on big libraries (~9000 files) though.

When they are clean and functional and do what I want them to do instead of what someone else wants them to do, then I will be very interested in how they look.