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foobar2000 is simply the best player ever made. It can be as simple or as complex as you want, it's light on resources (even with a library of over 70,000 songs loaded) and its DSP plugins make its sound quality second to none. Any audiophile who hasn't used fb2k does not know what they are missing.

For a quick and easy music player, I recommend Xion. It's similar to Winamp in that it's more about eye candy than audio features, except that it's not bloated and making skins for it is super easy.

Exactly. Only a seriously uninformed person would use Songbird. It's pure, bloated crap. Even more bloated than Winamp.

Use foobar2000 instead. You can do infinitely more with it and it has a tiny footprint. If you don't need something that powerful but is easy to use, then grab Xion.

If you're using Linux, then use Open Cubic Player or something. If you're using MacOS, then you have bigger problems than worrying about what music player to use.

http://www.r2.com.au/software.php?page=2&show=startdelay

Best program I've ever used. Allows you to delay when programs start so they don't all start at the same time and you can actually USE windows as soon as you log in.

Tonic is purely peer-to peer and discovers everyone on your broadcastable subnet.

http://r2.com.au/software.php?page=2&show=tonic

Tonic ? Free not FOSS no server needed client side logging from the product page : http://www.r2.com.au/software.php?page=2&show=tonic You want the power and convenience of instant messaging, but don't need or want the clients to talk to the outside world. Be it a bunch of friends having a LAN party, or a large corporation - instant messaging makes working together easy. Unfortunately, existing instant messengers allow users to communicate with the entire planet, not just your local network. Also check out the latest betas very stable . http://www.r2.com.au/publicbeta.php?page=12

Tonic ? Free not FOSS no server needed client side logging from the product page : http://www.r2.com.au/software.php?page=2&show=tonic You want the power and convenience of instant messaging, but don't need or want the clients to talk to the outside world. Be it a bunch of friends having a LAN party, or a large corporation - instant messaging makes working together easy. Unfortunately, existing instant messengers allow users to communicate with the entire planet, not just your local network. Also check out the latest betas very stable . http://www.r2.com.au/publicbeta.php?page=12

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.

Have you tried Tonic?

We use it at work for instant messenging. It has a number of features similar to MSN/ICQ, etc but its LAN only and best of all its free!

We have about 60 users online and the performance is very good.
Their latest beta builds are improving nicely with features such as multichat so hopefully a new version will be released soon.

Tonic. Simple internal IM. It just works.

http://www.r2.com.au/software.php?page=1&show=toni c