I use foobar but enjoy winamps visual plugins, namely Milk. Itunes is great for the GUI as well. So im curious as to what you use and your reasons.

I use iTunes, because of its integration with the iPod and Apple TV. Of course, I'm a Mac user, so my choices are limited.

I am loyal to only Peter!






(foobar people )

foobar2000. if i had a mac, i'd use Play

Windows: Winamp for listening, foobar2000 for lossless to lossy transcoding as well as ReplayGain scanning (except MP3 and AAC, which are processed by aacgain.exe instead).

Winamp and me have become close friends after more than 6 years of usage. I've highly customized the player up to this point, concerning both usability and eye-candy, like the inclusion of certain external input and output plug-ins, a lyrics one, Album List as well as the Guilty Gear XX Reload skin. These customizations make Winamp a very decent jukebox.

Some time ago I was close to set an end to this friendship due to foobar's increasing technical superiority, but the Winamp team has done an outstanding job at improving their player with the current 5.3x series, having made me change my mind. But nonetheless, for file operations I keep using foobar2000 instead, because its converter allows the implementation of external command-line encoders, and the ReplayGain scanner is much faster than Winamp's one.


Linux: Amarok, which is much more used than Winamp, due to me operating under Linux most of the time. It's the first decent player I stumbled across during my first attempts at walking with the OpenSuse 10.2 distribution around 5 months ago. Helix Banshee didn't turn out being a big deal at all, Xmms wasn't of much interest, since I simply didn't want to use another Winamp under Linux. Meanwhile I gave Xmms2 a shot, but its GUIs are still in their early development stages. The latter is a bit sad, because some tests with Xmms2 via the command line revealed very promising capabilities of the technology used by it.

A well-configured Amarok beats these players in my opinion, though it needs a lot of tweaking in order to do so. The lack of ReplayGain support is a serious drawback, but luckily resolved by a working script. Gapless playback via the xine engine is only supported with a few formats, e.g. LAME MP3, Musepack and Vorbis. The AAC collection I just created using the new Nero encoder has to rely on simple crossfading instead. Moodbar support with AAC only works by downloading packages from unstable external Debian sources, since Ubuntu's repository lacks sufficient versions of the gstreamer-bad/-faad plug-ins. Possibly for legal reasons the Amarok package was also built with only partially working MP4 tag reading support (certain genres can't be read) and entirely non-working writing one, having forced me to build an Amarok package with full MP4 capabilities myself.

The additional amount of work was the price for replacing my former Open Source (Vorbis) collection by the patented AAC, but for several reasons I finally decided going for the latter. Despite the troubles which were to be expected if trying to play the format back by Amarok in my current Kubuntu (Feisty Fawn) distribution.

iTunes for managing, playing, burning audio and MP3 CD's and "feeding" the iPod.

Foobar for transcoding, etc.

I use iTunes for everything that deals with audio management except for CD ripping and transcoding of lossless files (that is handled by dbpoweramp). Why iTunes? Because I have a 3G iPod, 4G iPod, 5G iPod, and 2G iPod shuffle. It is easier to manage iPods when using iTunes. I also use iTunes because of the clean and easy to use UI along with the integration of the iTunes Store which I use to purchase those digital EPs, digital singles, or hard to find albums.

I use all three! Winamp's the one I've been using the longest, I use it to test and play MP3s. My properly tagged music then gets added to iTunes (which also fills up my iPod when needed).
Foobar I use for more exotic file formats or more frequently, to convert from lossless to lossy - it's so convenient for doing that!

I use iTunes. Simple to use and just powerful enough to fill my power user needs. Smart Playlists are simply awesome.

Combined with my iPod, I have no reason to switch to another player.

I use Mp3toys for content management and its external player feature to send songs to Foobar.

Although my Foobar is nice and pretty these days, Mp3toys is just better from an eye candy standpoint with the way it shows cover art and playlists. The way you can drag cover art and lyrics is a huge plus for me since my whole collection was ripped without the internet. Playlists are

But I use Foobar to play the files because of its ASIO support and its advanced dsp functions.

Both support hotkeys, so I can easily remote control them both at the same time. Volume for Foobar and play/pause and skip for Mp3toys.

Sometimes I use winamp as the player, but Mp3toys is my front end.

foobar2000 is my answer to all things audio related.

I use iTunes, for the following reasons:
* Clean and easy to use
* Apple Lossless support
* AirTunes support
* Integrates with iPod
* iTunes Store
* Cover flow
* Smart playlists

I used to use Winamp because nothing else offered the same functionality, even though it looks like shit and the library's a dog. I used Foobar2000 occasionally - it's nice but way way too barebones and clumsy to set up.

After WMP11 came out, I switched to that and I still like it a lot - it's much better than most give it credit for: incredibly fast with large libraries, it works fantastic with albums, and syncing with pretty much all non-iPod portable players works out-of-the-box, reliably. The taskbar player is nice too.

But now it's iTunes.

I always dismissed iTunes because despite the fantastic UI (the best, you're kidding yourself if you deny this) it was horribly slow with large libraries. But somewhere between 4.6 and 7.0 they fixed the performance issues, and added proper album viewing, gapless and fullscreen CoverFlow. Some 3rd party add-ons added sync with non-iPods. Now it's just short a few minor things (folder watch, HE-AAC, auto-transcode-on-sync), but I can live with that.

Foobar2000 for everything. There just isn't anything that offers the same kind of functionality: from cd ripping, tagging and replaygaining to listening, converting and burning. I use it to transcode files for portable and to manage my music library. The amazing format support is a big perk.

Visually, I have a pretty basic setup, just plain columnsui with an album art panel added. It's simple but oh so efficient. I don't really care about the latest panelui stuff.

Can you give any specifics? What are the plugins you use? And do you know if there's a simple plugin to view album art? I've been looking but can't seem to find one. Tried Album List but it's not what I want - I just want to be able to see art in ID3v2 tags, if present.

Thanks!

I use Winamp.

I need it because of the Adapt-X plugin that allows me to use the Waves Linear phase EQ. The Adapt-X programme doesn't work with anything else.

I use Itunes for my Nano but use the Nero encoder @ 128.

I love this question since the debate over which one is better/more extensible/cooler/practical will never die. Of course since you are asking on a site that is frequented by fb2k fans, you will get a biased answer (not biased in the sense that fb2k adherents are not able to provide fair feedback but biased in the sense that you are asking in a self-selecting group).

I am totally a fb2k fan now. It has taken me about 1 year to come around with fits and starts but now I am convinced that fb2k is the player for me. Why you ask (well maybe you didn't but I will share anyways)?

I am using a basic Columns UI with some of my favorite columns added because I choose/am unable to too much with title formatting. Despite my self-imposed ignorance, I still think that fb2k is a fantastic media player/library/tagger/file management system since it has so much in one place. My focus in on the practical rather than the aesthetic or technical; however, both of those considerations can be addressed by more talented users. I have .flac, .wma, .aac, and .mp3 files and fb2k is one of the few players that recognize all of these formats easier and display tags correctly for editing.

Tagging: I have to admit that I would love to have fb2k pull info from Amazon or AMG but I can live with freedb and discogs plugin. I love being able to restructure my files. I stored my music files in /(first letter of %artist%)/%artist%/%album%/%##% - %title%. but it was a snap to create a script to move all of the kid's music to a new directory /Children/%artist%)/%artist%/%album%/%##% - %title% thanks to file operations. I have not figured out how to turn file names into tags yet but I don't really need to since I have good tags so far.

Playback: fb2k has great support for almost all known codecs without needing a billion filters/splitters/etc unlike nearly every other player (see iTunes and WMP11). Replay gain is nice and most players don't have it implemented as well as fb2k. Sound is great but not significantly different from other players.

Media Library: An amazing variety of options for viewing and using your media library. My favorites are playlist bind, album list, quicksearch, database search, and autoplaylist.

Support for portables: Thanks to send_to_device this is where fb2k makes my life easier. WMP11, iTunes, MediaMonkey (free version), winamp (free version) will not convert to a chosen format, bitrate, etc when loading up my portables. They enforce their out of the box load points. fb2k is awesome for this because it will convert to what I want not what Apple, MS, etc wants.

Ripping: fb2k does it all. I used EAC, and still do for really messed up discs, but not it is all rip, transcode, tag, etc with fb2k.

Burning: I wish that fb2k did this but I don't see that as being possible so I have to resort to WMP11. I would use burrrn except it does not support wma.

I think that fb2k is a screaming deal since it does so much so well. It may not be the best of class in some areas but it is in the top decile. I am especially impressed since I am not all that technical and I can get it to work for everything I need and do not require a separate ripper, tagger, media library, playlist manager, and playback device.

iTunes
- AirPort integration
- iTunes store integration
- very good interface
- Nike+ integration
- Works nearly flawlessly with my iPods.

Windows with EAC/LAME to rip & encode.

MediaMonkey to manage FLAC's.

1) MediaMonkey: to rip/tag/organize mp3s + create playlists + copy mp3s to portable player. It's not as powerful as foobar but good enough for me.

2) mp3gainGUI

3) foobar 0.8.3 with various plugins: I use it occasionally as a "swiss knife" when I need to do something special. Sometimes I still use it as a player. I don't use foobar 0.9.x because newer versions lack certain features I need.

4) I also have to use WMP to listen to certain radio stations (those which have a parallel artist-title metadata stream to a WMP browser window instead of normal tags.)

In the old days I used winamp (until version 2.9x IIRC), but not using it any longer.

Toaster is a great tool to display album art as well as some informations about the currently playing song. You can configure it to animate its display, choose if and when it should fade out, and whether it should show both the cover and metadata or only the former. Problem is, it's no "simple plugin". Maybe not what you're actually searching for.

Cover Tag doesn't force you to mess around with any complicated settings, it simply reads the tags and displays them in Winamp's video window.

CD Art Display is a cool external application which works with a lot more players than just Winamp. It's restricted to Windows XP and Vista, though.

Since you're using MP3, the MAD input plugin might be of serious interest to you. Unlike Nullsoft's one it offers support for APEv2 in MP3 and a very advanced ID3v2 editor. It also displays LAME-specific infos, if present.

I also integrated Leo's Lyrics into Winamp. Its lyrics database is very rich, offering a lot more than only typical mainstream content. During the last few months the lyrics server was periodically unavailable, though.
In conjunction with Leo's Lyrics it's advisable also to use the Intro Play plugin. Set the intro play to 5 seconds and let it run through your whole collection, making the lyrics plugin download the appropriate lyrics overnight. Just don't make the mistake to configure Leo's Lyrics to automatically download the first best result it finds. If it was unable to find an exact match, it shouldn't download the lyrics, otherwise you'd most likely end up with a lot of garbage in the database. Besides, don't forget to disable Winamp 5's Advanced Title Formatting while downloading lyrics, it tends to confuse the plugin in some cases.

iTunes on both Windows and Mac. I have other tools but it is really nice to have a "one stop shop" for virtually everything that is essentially identical on both platforms. A big plus is that it works extremely well with large libraries (in my case, 21,000 tracks on my main iMac).

I make much use of iTunes sharing and Airtunes functions. All very easy, there isn't much to explain to family members (yours truly is ever so married with children). My 8-year old can get everything done on her own, an unlikely thing with a product like Foobar2K.

I use other players infrequently for certain specialized things (such as quickly reviewing files before adding them to an iTunes library) but for regular use, listening, managing the collection and the iPods, iTunes fills the bill.

When I encounter a format not supported by iTunes (e.g. FLAC, Ogg, etc.) I use Foobar2K (Windows) or Max (Macintosh) to translate/transcode. Fortunately this is not required often, perhaps 5 times a year.

Foobar2000 because I customise it exactly how I want it to work, also has the best tagging and file renaming feature out there.

Hello everyone.

First post on here from me, after lurking for a few months.

I use Foobar for everything now.

For several reasons:

I like the simple interface and low use of resources.

It does everything I want really easily with just a few mouse clicks. I think it is one of the best programs I've ever used. In fact, I stopped using Linux, which used to be my main operating system because I missed foobar so much.

I only use the standard interface - no columns UI or Panels UI. Also the equaliser is the best I've found. 18 band is unusual in my experience. It is also very natural sounding to my ears. I used to use those enhancer type things on winamp but found them tiring on the ears after a while.

The converter is great, as is the ABX tool. It rips well and has freedb support. I used to use EAC to rip but found it very slow on my system. I can't tell the difference between rips using the two, with Lame as the encoder.

I only use winamp to rip streams. The streamripper plugin is great for that. I wish there was one for foobar.

I only use itunes to sync my ipod.

Great feedback.

I use foobar and really the only thing keeping me from using itunes is the lack of flac support. There was at one point a xiph plugin you could use to get flac playback in itunes but it doesnt seem to work anymore, at least for me. Is there currently any way to do so?

WMP11 for library management and playback

foobar for auxiliary (non-library) playback and transcoding

I use foobar for almost everything.....

For ripping, I use dBpoweramp (http://www.dbpoweramp.com/)

For tagging/renaming, I use Tag&Rename (http://www.softpointer.com)

Foobar for everything - it has a light footprint, and doesn't tend to seize up when I put the system under load.

I use a combination of Picard and Mp3tag to keep my tags and files in order.

Until last year I have always been a Winamp user, but I always wanted a better tagging interface and better use of the ID3 standard tags. I found Helium MM somewhat great as a tag util, but when I discovered foobar2000 with ColumnsUI, I figured that it could completely replace Helium and even has more possebilities with it's titleformatting strings! I'm sold

Foobar2000.

At present, it's the be-all-end-all solution for me (except ripping, where i use EAC mainly because i need the log files). Right now i've got a creative flash player which has UMS support so foobar's copy option works well in it, but i'm planning to get a zune soon. So i might be seeing a bit more of Zune/WMP than i'd like .

Foobar2000 when I'm on Windows, MPD with Gnome Music Player Client when I'm on Linux.

wouldn't a poll have been much better?

As an audiophile I use foobar offcourse! Other tools I use are: EAC, dBpowerAMP, MrQuestionman and Tagscanner.

I use foobar exclusively. I used to use Winamp, but I could never switch back now. foobar's has its masstagger, converter, mass-filename-editing, ABX and binary comparator tools, and lots of useful DSPs. Especially Convert stereo to 4 channels, the PPHS resampler, and the excellent Convolver, which I now use instead of the 18-band equalizer. foobar's customizability and scriptability are unparalleled, and I use it to my advantage to make all my audio-related work much easier.

And it only uses up 3-4MB of memory with 7,000 tracks loaded.

foobar2000 all the way!
Why should I use one program for tagging, one for transcoding, one for listening and so on?
It it would be better at ripping (more secure, logs, etc) it would trow away from my HDD even EAC.

ITunes for MP3 and AAC playback/tagging/artwork because with 7 Macs and 2 iPods in the house it is by far the easiest solution for sharing libraries, syncing pods etc. I was a committed SoundJam user back in the OS 9 days so it was the path of least resistance when making the jump to Jaguar way back whenever it was.

I transcode from FLAC/APE/SHN with XLD or xACT/shntool (depending on format), audition before adding to iTunes library with Cog or Play and tag FLACs with Media Rage.

I use iTunes exclusively.

I love the UI - super clean and polished - and I would never get by without Cover Flow anymore. I love flipping through the album art like its a pile of vinyl.

It's also completely integrated with my 8gb iPod nano and OS X.

I use foobar2000 for transcoding & ripping CDs, XMPlay for usual audio playing,
KbSTE(local software : ) for tagging, and iTunes for only sync my iPod and various podcasts.

I like the design and amazing functions of iTunes, but it's too sluggish...

Foobar. Been using it for years, and thanks to the Fofr config I am even more happy. And through the joystick plugin I also have a remote control for it. Hooray! It does everything I want. And people who answer that they use Foobar for the sound quality can be disregarded, as it has been pointed out numerous times (by Peter and others) that the 'better sound' from foobar is nothing but placebo. However, the features of the program are amazing, its lightweight, got great media library management for large music collections and the amount of components available makes it my number one choice.

foobar for 4 years (before that is Winamp). Simple ColumnUI config with trackinfo for statistics.

Foobar for 2 years due to already stated reasons: low footprint and fast startup (at least without the PanelsUI ), file operations, tagging, incredible plugins and customization, and the best ReplayGain support. Been using FofR and looks great but thinking of returning to simple ColumnsUI which proved itself simple and valuable.
(yes, a poll would have been great!)

Thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for! Finally I can see album art in Winamp, too.



I'd heard of the MAD plugin before, but never gotten round to installing it. Didn't realize what I was missing! The ability to display LAME tags is very useful.

Anyway, thanks a lot for your detailed reply! Much appreciated, and I'm sure not just by me!

Bluenote

Itunes for syncing mp3 files to ipod. Foobar 2000 for flac playback, and for creating mass mp3 conversions from flac. DbPoweramp for creating other lossy from flac. I prefer the right tools for the job, rather than stretching one tool to do many tasks. But that is just me:)

I use musikCube, because of it's simplicity, fast start up time, low cpu usage, and it looks like a normal windows program. Plus you can move the elements around, like drag the equalizer to the top, left, right, or bottom.

I used to use foobar2000, but after hurricane katrina destroyed my old pc, I never got around to installing it again.

Before I knew exactly how helpful HA was, I scrounged the internet to find the best media player so I could sort my music the way I wanted.

I was faithful to WMP for the longest time until the media library became a process hog on my computer. I switched to Winamp and was faithful to that for three years until last year when something NSIS based was installed with winamp and created a lot of popups and would disconnect me from the internet. Since then I haven't touched Winamp.

I tried iTunes because of its growing popularity and quickly disliked it. The interface annoyed me, the file sorting ability was bogus, and to top it off it did something that made half of my music (20GB) unplayable by either Winamp or WMP. Never did figure out what happened. Luckily my neighbor had Cool Edit Pro (now known as Adobe Audition) and I did a batch convert of all those files to 128kbps MP3 (before I knew that lossy transcoding is a no-no).

The moment I found FooBar2000 I loved it. It has as small footprint, plays damned near everything (including my contiguous APE with CUE albums), and has that same simple feel to it like VLC Media Player. Like everyone says, it is a swiss army knife. So long as it keeps being the awesomeness it is, I won't change players.

However... if VLC, FB2K and REACT were to have a baby media player... I would install that in a heart beat.

I use Foobar because of it support for ASIO. On my system I like ASIO better, and therefore Foobar which supports it. I also like the sound of Winamp since it also supports ASIO. So does XMplayer. But iTunes and WMP11 don't sound nearly as good as ASIO supporting players.

If you aren't running ASIo, then I totally agree with this statement. Otherwise i like Foobar and ASIO.

Maybe it is placebo, but if you can show me an easy way to ABX DS and ASIO I'll try to find out.

used winamp for many many years,also dBpowerAMP for converting,tried foobar for little time.
Also tried iTunes bit it is too big and heavy and not practical

I use Foobar for playing and encoding lossless formats into MP3 -I do V2- to keep them in my comp.
I use FLACFrontend to encode/decode wav and FLAC files, and Trader's Little helper to do same with APE and SHN. Foobar does that, too, but those ones are better.
Foobar is the best stuff to handle all kinda files I have ever used, can't listen to APE and SFN stuff as well, and I can build it according to my needs and tastes.
Don't think I will use ITunes, ever. I think I would not like it. Don't like apps which use many CPU resources.

For ripping and converting I use dbpoweramp and tag with mp3tag and magictagger. For management I use iTunes because of Coverflow.

I've considered foobar but I found myself wasting too much time trying to customize it. If I had the skills and knowhow I have no doubt foobar would be my first choice.

Some time ago I had Winamp as Player. But the performance was really worse and it started to crash a lot and the speed was very slow.
For a year I think I use foobar. At first I was wondering why so many people are so nuts on foobar. Now I couldn't imagine to live without. I like to customize the player myself.
I use Foobar2000 for everything I need.

But I must admit that I have also jetaudio on my PC because of some friends who don't like foobar and who want to have a player similar to winamp.
Jetaudio is an all in one Player for audio and video. That is pretty cool.

But I must say I use Foobar 98% of the time.

i use Foobar on a flashdrive. i can go to any project office & plug-in the flash, iPod & Grados.