Nikhil Dev

Ok, So I must have tried at least 15 music players till date including ones like Winamp, Media Player, Music Match Jukebox, Sonique, iTunes, Media Monkey, Media Player Classic and many more that I dont even remember now. But after this open source keeda cought up with me, I wanted to see what would the area of music have in store for us in this open source environment. Been to some forums, read a lotta reviews, downloaded a lotta them, screwed up my sys several times. I wanted all that a media player can offer in a small package. So lets see what factors I have concluded on.

1. I wanted to have something relatively very small. Maybe just about 5 mb to the max of an installation package. In this category, there were two interesting candidates. The first is media player classic that comes as package with K-lite mega codec pack and all the audio codecs that one would ever need. The next one is Foobar that has always been my favourite. Media player classic as a software takes a very small place to install. Just about 2 mb. Whereas foobar comes as just a 1.6 mb installation. It beats most of the players in all aspects. Even when playing quite a lengthy playlist, foobar takes just about 1.7 mb of memory which is one of the biggest credits of player.

2. The next criteria is the interface and the ease of use. In this, I would nominate Winamp and Foobar. Winamp has always had the best and the easiest interface ever made. Foobar has also taken some inspiration from this and placed most essentials controls in the first window. Even Foobar has an edge over Winamp cos, it uses no skinning( which means faster load times), and basic windows concept. It just blows out all the other players when it comes to inteface. The player can be resized to just as a sidebar for easy accesibility.

3. When it comes to file type support, Winamp, Foobar and Media Monkey are the ones that dominate my list. Winamp as evolved over years and supporting all the file types that one might encode in. But i found that sometimes it fails to play a few file types if they are not encoded properly in a known file type. Foobar takes the lead here and supports almost all the file types as Winamp and plays allthe file types with ease. Media monkey on the other hand plays most of the formats as foobar but fails to play M4A. This is a drawback as some of the music from my ipod are in .m4a format.

4. Library management which might be something that some people do. But it surely is an important thing to some people. The heirarchy of my preference for library management would be Media monkey, Winamp and then Foobar. Media Monkey has by far the best way to manage the library. You can manage it as based on id3 tags or as disc navigation. Foobar on the other has a really simple interface and quick playing. Winamp has been the same over years and actually serves the purpose.

5. Device Support - Here Media Monkey, beats the competition. It has by far the best friendship with all the version of ipods. In fact you can add files into and ipod using this as well as copy them back to your computer. Winamp has a native support for ipod and is good just for playing. Foobar has abs no support for devices.

6. Visualizations, Plugins:- Winamp is the leader of this area. It has the biggest library of visualizations and plugins that I have ever seen. Foobar on the other hand as good ASIO plugin if you have a card that supports ASIO. I use foobar cos I have a creative sound blaster that supports ASIO.

There are a lot of other features that can be discussed but if we do that, the list would never end. My conclusion are that if you are looking of a small, nifty and advanced player, then Foobar is the one for you. If you are a huge music enthusiast with a realllly huge library, then Media Monkey is the best for you. And if you want so decent o/p of your comp with some visual bling with sking and visualizations, then Winamp is the one for you. So go ahead and download the one that suits your needs.

Leave a comment if you need more info on music playing software as I believe I have done quite some research on them.