Over the past couple of years, I have been on a constant search for a music player. In my experience of music players since 1998, I have sampled the gamut, everything from the Linux-only Amarok, past Apple's inescaple iTunes, and into the obscure open source programs such as MusikCube.
Without a doubt, my favorite music player has been the previously mentioned Amarok, but the Linux-onliness of it interferes with the fact that I am thus far required to run Windows on my work PC.
iTunes has its upsides, but there are just a few too many maladjusted features which stem from the fact that it is the proprietary spawn of sata- err... where was I? Oh, right. Here are the criteria I have come up with for a media player to suit my needs:
- Must support the full gamut of audio codecs: Mp3 (duh), Ogg Vorbis, FLAC (I haven't used it yet, but I may want to some day) &c.
- Must allow for the maintenance and convenience of a media library. I remember the day when the standard mp3 collection was small enough that you just had a music folder you dumped everything in to, and when you wanted to listen to something you would drag and drop from Explorer into the playlist window. No more!
- A slew of features is nice, but more importantly, I want to be able to remove features I don't want to use. In otherwords, it should be basically an mp3 player, with a bunch of plug-in support for everything else.
- Customizable layout - I want to be able to arrange things so that the player window/pane goes here, the playlist pane goes here, the equlizer sits here, the media library is there, etc.
- It must be free. Now, there is free as in beer, and there is free as in Braveheart. In this case, I care more about the beerish 'freeness' than about Braveheartian 'freedom'. In other words, it needs to not cost anything to me, and that's more important than it being open source.
- It needs to run on Windows. If I had the liberty to run Linux, no doubt I would be running Amarok, since it truly is the best media player I have sampled.
After having sampled - as I said - a whole slew of players, I have settled once again on Winamp. Ah, Winamp! You won my love back in the 90s, lost it toward the early 'aughts', and I have once again returned to you!
Winamp combines the best of all of the above. It comes with more features than you can (or would want to) shake a stick at, but it also comes with the ability to uninstall pretty much everything that is attached to it. I recently downloaded and installed the latest version (5.something.something) and was dismayed with all the clutter in the media library. But I opened the preferences, and went to the plugins section, and low and behold, there they all were, and within 5 minutes I had it stripped back down to a nice, tight, slim little player.
The layout customization of Winamp is wonderful. Every section has its own window, which can be completely and independently moved around. If you want to, you can lock the windows together to create one big glom of media stuff, or you can detach them and organize them all seperately.
The default set of plugins supports all the codecs I care about (primarily mp3 and ogg) with additional plugins available for anything you might be missing.
And, Winamp basic (which is anything BUT) is free as in Beer! Yes, if you really want to, you can upgrade to Winamp Pro, but I'm at a loss for what features it might incorporate that aren't available either by default or as plugins.
It even incorporates global hotkeys, which allow me to start, stop, fast forward, rewind, and do just about anything else I want to from any application or window in Windows.
So congratulations, Winamp. I hereby award you a 3 Sneeze rating in the category of media players! You can pickup your plaque at the back of the auditorium.
COMING SOON:
I've been having ideas for a series of posts about the Fruits of the Spirit (see Galatians 5:22) rattling around in my head for the past week or so. Hopefully, if I put something here about how I'm going to post them, it'll actually get done ("He intoned the magic words 'Ala Kazaam!' and waved his arms in a big circle, and the spell was complete").
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