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Topic: Choice of Lightweight Music Player (Read 16676 times) previous topic - next topic
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Choice of Lightweight Music Player

(in your opinion)
Which is the best lightweight audio player from the list?

- Foobar2000 - http://www.foobar2000.org/
- Winamp - http://www.winamp.com/
- AIMP - http://www.aimp.ru/
- XMPlay - http://www.un4seen.com/
- musikCube - http://www.musikcube.com/
- Spider Player - http://spider-player.com/
- CoolPlayer - http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
- 1by1 - http://mpesch3.de1.cc/1by1.html
- Billy - http://www.sheepfriends.com/?page=billy
- Evil Player - http://www.hakeem.gigahost.dk/index.php
- VUPlayer - http://www.vuplayer.com/vuplayer.php
- Soprano - http://kimero.com.ar/pro/soprano.html
- Xion - http://xion.r2.com.au/
- QuickPlayer - http://www.ctuser.net/details.php?software...ons/quickplayer
- RainbowPlayer - http://www.nanocodesoft.com/rainbowplayer.htm
- ALSong - http://www.altools.com/ALTools/ALSong.aspx
- Pulse MP - http://www.orcave.com/pulse/
- wxMusik - http://musik.berlios.de/
- *Other*

Choose one and if possible give a brief explaination about your decision, please.

Thanks everyone 

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #1 –
foobar2000, for sheer technical perfection. No stupid skins crap, highly-functional interface, unlimited tagging power, support for any format I care about at all. Oh, and it's written by Peter Pawlowski, a coder whose skills I cannot overstate my respect for. I could go on for pages.

As for runners up, I'd recommend Winamp and XMPlay. They're both very competently-written players with plenty of time spent polishing. Nonetheless, for my tagging/renaming workflow, foobar2000 is superior.

Plus, if "lightweight" is what you want, you can take just about everything out of foobar2000 except for what you need.

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #4 –
People who ask for "the best" dont understand their own question. The kind of "the best" which you want to know, can be found, by looking at website-charts. Or you could as well start a pointless popularity vote.


(Explanation: OP just like everyone who starts a topic which contains the word "best", provided zero criteria for rating.)
I am arrogant and I can afford it because I deliver.

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #5 –
Quote from: Lyx on
People who ask for "the best" dont understand their own question. The kind of "the best" which you want to know, can be found, by looking at website-charts. Or you could as well start a pointless popularity vote.


(Explanation: OP just like everyone who starts a topic which contains the word "best", provided zero criteria for rating.)


I tried to create a poll with the entries of the list, but for some reason it didn't worked

I should say that the choice should be based on criteries such as:
Design | RAM/CPU Usage | Sound Quality | Audio Formats Supported | Integration with Explorer (Context Menu) | Drag&Drop Files on Playlist

and some other features...

Sorry for my English spelling errors...

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #6 –
For a while now it has been FooBar2000. I still use it.

However, in search of application lite on the RAM, I found MusikCube. It was great for my friend since it enabled random playing with a queue feature like Winamp. I love it too. Pros of MusikCube: Lite on RAM (max 10MB, 2MB idle), easy to use interface, fairly easy to use library, supports many formats out of the box. Cons: strict media sorting, no support of CUE sheets... and it takes over my volume control buttons, which is annoying. Still, it is an excellent program for the average and advanced user.

I still use Foobar2000. It isn't as lite as MusikCube, running in at 40MB for all around usage. However it supports everything with many many plugins and UI features. Amazing built in features for tagging, encoding/transcoding, organization, and library sorting/filtering. It is definitely my media Swiss-Army knife.
OP can't edit initial post when a solution is determined  :'-(

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #7 –
I don't know if it can be considered 'light weight' due to the built in skinning support, sqlite DB and vbscripting support, etc etc but...

The current VM size of Mediamonkey 3.03.1159 (debug) is ~65,000K according to task manager. This is with a 1+ TB library and numerous scripts installed.

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #8 –
Quote from: benski on
Windows reduces an application's working set (what shows in taskmgr) when minimized.  You should show the 'VM size' to get a better idea about memory usage.


The VM size has very little to do with the amount of physical memory that an application is using. Since it essentially contains counts all the memory that has been allocated (and possibly not written to) and all the code which is mapped into the process and anything else that is memory mapped such as memory mapped file IO. At the simplest level two instances of the same program running will have their code mapped into VM in both processes but will only actually be backed on one set of physical pages.

The amount of physical memory a processes is actually "using" under a  demand paged virtual memory OS is a very fuzzy concept.

The fact that the "Memory Usage" number attached to a process goes down is due to you not interacting with a window belonging to a process that it sitting there waiting for user input and therefore its pages getting swapped out so memory can be used as disk cache instead.

Virtual Memory management in modern OSes is a very complex subject, wikipedia has a lot of direct information but doesn't really have a gentle introduction.

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #9 –
I've been using XMPlay as my music player for about a year now and I absolutely love it.

With all the free plugins to support all the sound formats, skins, visuals, and full soundfont support for MIDI files, I don't use anything else to play my audio.

I use Foobar2000 for tagging and replaygaining.

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #10 –
Quote from: chelgrian on
The fact that the "Memory Usage" number attached to a process goes down is due to you not interacting with a window belonging to a process that it sitting there waiting for user input and therefore its pages getting swapped out so memory can be used as disk cache instead.


No, this is incorrect.  Like I said before, Windows reduces the working set of a process when you minimize it.  For a good explanation, see http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/293215
A program can do the same thing systematically via http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686234.aspx

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #11 –
I use Winamp for all of my media playback (audio and video) for the plain and simple reason that it works. On the extremely rare occasions that it doesn't natively support a particular format, a freely available plug-in almost always sorts the problem.

Although you're not asking about video players specifically, I'd like to add that Winamp plays back MPEG-4 encoded content far better than some other players due to it happily running ffdshow with custom post-processing filters. I also use a plug-in called VID4WA which allows you to redirect fullscreen output to either monitor on a dual-screen PC running under Windows. Without the ability to run both of these plug-ins, most other players produce unwatchably bad output on my 60" projection screen.

I use Foobar for audio file format conversion and tagging as it seems to be the most lightweight and easy to use application I can find for that purpose.

Cheers, Slipstreem. 

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #12 –
Quote from: benski on
No, this is incorrect.  Like I said before, Windows reduces the working set of a process when you minimize it.  For a good explanation, see http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/293215
A program can do the same thing systematically via http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686234.aspx


What an utterly bloody stupid thing for MS to implement. However if you read the link you gave you will see

"This does not mean that the memory pages used by the process are immediately discarded from RAM. In fact, these pages may remain resident for quite a while. They are simply flagged so that the system can use them for other processes as necessary. This is significantly faster than waiting on the system's standard trimming algorithm."

So MS have special cased identification of pages to swap out, presumably because their standard algorithm is too slow. However the ultimate reason a page gets swapped out is because the OS has run out of free pages or it is preferentially swapping process pages out to disk to allocate cache.

So the task manger is essentially lying to you as it is not counting pages which are resident but marked to be preferentially swapped out before any other pages.

I assume this only happens for things executing in the WINDOWS subsystem, I don't understand how it could affect something CONSOLE subsystem or as a local service.

This is almost as ridiculous as Windows increasing the scheduling quanta of the "foreground" application, unless you've specifically gone and told it to optimise for background services in the control panel.

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #13 –
Quote from: chelgrian on
So the task manger is essentially lying to you as it is not counting pages which are resident but marked to be preferentially swapped out before any other pages.


Exactly.  Insane, isn't it?  VM Size isn't the best measurement either (since, like you said, it includes other things like code or memory mapped i/o that's been mapped into your VM space), but it's much better than the easily-influenced "Memory Usage" column.

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #14 –
Foobar2k for extreme customization, programmability, and the sheer professionality of its components. Its a player, converter, retagger, with support for everything I can possibly imagine and more.

It's not exactly lightweight on my end, I need to redo the UI first (I have both columns and panels ui in use...)

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #15 –
Quote from: _FranZ_ on
I should say that the choice should be based on criteries such as:
Design

People have different preferences on what they find visually "good". So "design" isn't really a criteria but just another "thing" (GUI) which is rated.

Quote
| RAM/CPU Usage | Sound Quality

Applies to nearly all players mentioned, since they are "lightweight". The differences which are there are too low to be relevant for nowadays tech.

Quote
| Audio Formats Supported |

Nearly all players now support the most popular ones (except of VERY minimalist ones like 1by1). Audioformat-support only becomes relevant, if you need something unpopular to be played (i.e. wavpack, tracker-modules, SID-files, optimfrog, etc).

Quote
Integration with Explorer (Context Menu) | Drag&Drop Files on Playlist

These are things where differences actually start to be meaningful. Its the main reason why topics which ask for "the best" are useless: Unless you explain what you want to do with your audioplayer and which purposes it should fullfil, no meaningful choice can be made - because the differences in audioplayers nowadays are things, which differ from individual to individual. What to one person is an advantage, is to another person a disadvantage (i.e. features which one person needs, but which just irritate another person) - Practical example: i would dislike automatic integration into explorer contextmenu, because i want my apps to be portable and stealthy.

- Lyx
I am arrogant and I can afford it because I deliver.

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #16 –
foobar here.

p.s. (billy does look good, but it does miss just way to many things to be usefull (for me)).
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #17 –
I had to register to say thanks for the list
AIMP is great replacement for Winamp. I just tried it and I know this is "the one". The best thing about it... tabbed playlists! I won't be using Winamp again anytime soon, and iTunes can definately go now.

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #18 –
I used foobar2000 for some time then moved to musiKcube.

I have since moved back to foobar2000. 

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #19 –
Quote from: Son of Metal on
I had to register to say thanks for the list
AIMP is great replacement for Winamp. I just tried it and I know this is "the one". The best thing about it... tabbed playlists! I won't be using Winamp again anytime soon, and iTunes can definately go now.


I am happy to know I helped you

*List Updated* (Check 1st post)

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #20 –
I decided to try and make a "lite" version of FB2K and after cutting everything but the foo_albumlist, foo_cdda, foo_input_std, and foo_ui_std, it runs at 22~24MB. I wonder if the brainiacs behind FB2K can make a lite version that is just the player and media library.

WOW! When minimized and left to play anything, it runs at ~2MB!!!

Update:
I created two installation directories of FB2K. The only requirement is that one changes the user profile settings.
Go to File > Preferences > General > Location of Configuration Files > select "Application Install Folder - ..." and save.
More information here.
OP can't edit initial post when a solution is determined  :'-(

Choice of Lightweight Music Player

Reply #21 –
Quote from: Canar on
foobar2000, for sheer technical perfection. No stupid skins crap, highly-functional interface, unlimited tagging power, support for any format I care about at all. Oh, and it's written by Peter Pawlowski, a coder whose skills I cannot overstate my respect for. I could go on for pages.

As for runners up, I'd recommend Winamp and XMPlay. They're both very competently-written players with plenty of time spent polishing. Nonetheless, for my tagging/renaming workflow, foobar2000 is superior.

Plus, if "lightweight" is what you want, you can take just about everything out of foobar2000 except for what you need.


Right, but does it support syncing to MTP devices?
Zen Micro Photo 8GB
EP 630 x2 (RIP)
JVC Marshmallow