WinAmp vs MP vs iTunes vs MusicMatch etc (1 Viewer)

[Darren Lewis]

Which of the plethora of MP3 players/library organisers is the best to use on WinXP?

I rip CDs using EAC and code with LAME so that side of things isn't important.

I'm looking for something to organise playlists and burn selected playlists out to CD to play in the car.

Thanks.

 

[Chris]

As much as I loved WinAmp, it's a dead product. AOL canned everyone working on it, so none of the original staff are tehre, and it will not continue in development from what the forums tell us (AOL could have a change of heart and revive nullsoft, but not so sure about that).

ITunes seems to do a fair job of organizing different playlists, though there is a lot about it that I don't really care for (or think needs changed).

Haven't fooled around with MusicMatch is a while. Hmm. I may give it another look for this purpose too.. I need to do a lot of ID3 tag editing to get my library back straight

 

[Angelo.M]

I really like iTunes.

 

[NickSo]

foobar2000

 

[Jassen M. West]

Another vote for foobar, Winamp uses about 15MB of ram while playing, foobar uses 2-3 MB. Also foobar seems to enhance the sound quality of the music.

 

[Scott L]

Foobar2k for me too. Supports Kernel streaming if you have the right sound card for a raw, unaltered bitstream.

J. River Media Center comes highly recommended for organizing music though.

iTunes is great also but when you burn a CD it does not support CD-Text. :frowning: You should be able to tag your songs and burn in something like Nero for full CD-R tagging support.

 

[Kevin M]

Wasn't all of this covered in THIS RECENT THREAD by Ron?

 

[Angelo.M]

No.

That thread dealt with ripping and encoding mp3's, and burning CD data discs w/ mp3 files. This thread is about mp3 playback and playlist organization.

 

[Rob Silver]

iTunes for encoding and organizing my library and Foobar for playback. That's right, I can't hear the difference between iTunes encoded VBR and LAME encoded VBR anyway. They all sound good when I play them back with kernel stream high bitrate playback with Foobar + Chaintech 710.

 

[Ted Lee]

really? i didn't know that. too bad, cuz i really like(d) that program. clean, simple, easy to use, etc. it was my program of choice before my ipod.

but i must admit i now exclusively use itunes since it xfers songs to my ipod and i hate having multiple programs that do the same thing on my pc.

 

[Greg*go]

WinAmp's Death Greatly Exaggerated

I've heard a lot of good stuff about Foobar, but I was never able to get into it. Perhaps when a final version is released I'll give it another try. I think I'm the only person on the continent that likes Winamp 3.0

 

[Darren Lewis]

Thanks for all the info. iTunes looks pretty good. Any disadvantages to using it to manage a collection and burn CDs? I don't have an IPod (yet!).

Musicmatch seems a bit bloated and slow (even on my P4-3.2 with 2Gb RAM), but maybe it's just the interface I don't like. Foobar seems very basic for managing a large(ish) music library, but I didn't really play with it much. Didn't like the interface for J. River Media Center :frowning:

Chris, if you need to do a lot of ID3 tagging, have a look at Tag & Rename which I tried once as a demo. It does a good job of sorting out batches of tags and file renaming. Alternatively, there's MP3Tag (and probably a few more).

Thanks.

Darren.

 

[Angelo.M]

Foobar, in my experience, needs a lot of tinkering to make it user-friendly. I gave up on it.

I still really like Winamp. Winamp 5.07 is newly available.