Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Music Player / Music Management Software

Warning

This is more of a rant than a legitimate article.

Winamp is old(/paid software sucks) -- Let's get a replacement

what do you use for music management / playback? i used Winamp (winaMP3) for music playing/management until recently, and finally decided to switch (it felt really old). however, it is my reference/benchmark. i want any replacement to do what it did for me (watch multiple folders, playlists, global hotkeys) and more (not feel so dated, be less of a resource hog, natively scrobble to last.fm, allow mass tagging). those are reasonable expectations, right?

Songbird

i switched to Songbird bc i prefer programs that aren't 'free' with a separate 'paid version,' when possible. it had some good reviews/recommendations and lots of neat features...the website was well done. however, it has a horrible UI when it comes to a 'now playing' section // interactive playlist. apparently, this has been a problem for 4 years or so. until it gets fixed, i decided to look elsewhere since that is such a big part of my listen-flow.

foobar2000

i'd downloaded foobar2000 a while ago (when i first heard of songbird) but was turned off by just how bland it looked (especially on Windows XP). after just having installed it again, i'm pretty happy. it seems to be pretty capable. i did spend 20 minutes getting it configured to my liking (added freedb tagger and audio scrobbler for last.fm posting) and making adjustments to the layout. i may look into some various themes...but am a fan, so far.

iTunes

of course, there's itunes. but (like winamp), it feels bloated and i can't stand that it keeps pushing quicktime on me and running services in the background. it probably does most of the stuff i want, though...to be fair.

...thoughts

anyone have any other suggestions?