Jump to content
Hondo's Bar

What's the best music player around?


Jumbie

Recommended Posts

Posted

I just upgraded to Windows Media Player 10 and I'm getting trouble.

 

I don't know if it's the v10 upgrade or what, but it's refusing to play some songs and gives me this message:

 

"Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file."

 

However, the old version of Winamp I have, which I haven't used for a long time, plays the songs just fine.

 

What am I missing here?

 

Any advice on an alternate player? I stopped using Winamp cuz I was getting better playback quality on media player, but I've never enjoyed media player or it's interface.

 

 

Also, on top of all this I want to ask how you guys manage your playlists. DO you add every new song to every playlist manually? That seems kinda tedious but it's the only way I know how.

 

Like say you DL the Dust Brothers theme from FIght club. That would probably fit into playslists for instrumental, soundtrack and heavy music.

 

Is there a player out there that would let you tag a song with multiple tags and then you can just call up all the songs with that tag? Media Player lets you chose just ONE genre for each song. SO I can't tag Stairway to Heaven as being both Classic Rock and 70s.

Posted

hooo boy.

 

I was on winamp forever, cause of the low resources and good playability of damn near any file...windows media, you mainly need to have the codecs to play things, but that's for video files.

 

getting an ipod forced me, in an unkind and unwanted manner, to learn to love itunes. I have to say, it was a mean bitch at first...you know how winamp uses ID3 tags, meaning, youve got your filename, let's say "Dust Brothers - Fight Club theme.mp3" and then you put it in winamp and it shows as "FIGHT CLUB THEME" or whatever its tagged as? Well, itunes completely goes off those tags, meaning, i had to use another program to get the tags on all 45+ gigs of my music sorted...that took days.

 

Also, if youre a stickler for genre and album information, itll take even longer. The plus side? itunes, and even on the ipod itself (newer models) will show you a small image of the album cover when playing a track, which is fun. i dont even notice what genre it catergorizes shit in personally, as i just use playlists for every genre i have.

 

The biggest advantage of itunes over winamp is the search menu; i can go through my 10,000 plus songs really quick the way it archives them all; i enter "D" and get a ton of stuff, "Du", narrows it down, by "Dus" im usually right at the song i want in the search menu...this isnt to say the winamp search was bad either, mind you, ive just gotten used to this since last year.

 

Overall? if i wasnt using an ipod, id stay with Winamp. There's nothing it left to be desired as a player, and if you for some reason think youre not getting enough fidelity, you can fuck with the options to up the quality, and i think there's plugins to enhance as well, but youd have to have a top-notch audio system to notice the difference, assumign all your mp3's are like 128/160 kbs or above quality (192 kbs as i understand it is exactly the compressino off an original disc, so you shoudl shoot for that if you feel something's lacking). Hope that helps, man.

Posted

Yeah, I had to redo the tags for my ZEN mp3 player a couple months back.

 

Is the itunes player free, then? Does it only work for MP3s bought from itunes?

 

And does it offer support for wma? I just don't want to bump into any DRM issues, cuz everything I got is DL'd from filesharing pirates.

 

Also, what about playlist management. DO you do the manual playlist making?

Posted

1) its free.

2) it works with all mp3's, ive never bought shit off of itunes.

3) what it does, is convert the .wma's and other such files to mp3's and just copies that into its own directory.

4) yeah, i just clicked & dragged to make my own playlists. You gotta customize if you want genres like yacht rock.

 

if you already have your tags sorted, its a good idea. check the ipod thread in the tech forum, somewhere in there RA fieled all the questions i could ever have before i went and tried it out.

 

the biggest thing i had to deal with, beyond the tagging, was taht the program wants to re-do your folders on the drive itself, meaning it wants to copy them into its own folder. Eventually, after having backed up all my music anyway, i just let it. now i have 1 itunes folder with like 1,000+ folders in it, by artist name (whereas i used to have folders by genre, natch).

Posted

i swear, its only still there to rip the occassional CD track, cause i always forget how winamp does that. any program that asks "can i fucking associate with all your music and smut?" and ignores my "no" click is, in my book, like 1/3 spyware.

Posted

man, if i knew, id convert all .avi, .mov etc to just mpegs. i visit doom9.net for all kindsa utitlites but im just not that good with shit.

Posted

i dont mind musicmatch, purely because it can convert excessively high bitrate songs into just normal 128's... and i like the cdrip function on it....

 

i dont mind itunes either, purely for its ability to tag multiple songs at once....

 

but i've been using winamp now for about 4-5 years.... ive Never had a problem with it

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...