What's the best mp3 player these days?

[schmosef]

I'm looking for something without a lot of bells and whistles.

I just want to play mp3s with as little cpu overhead as possible.

Right now I rent most of my music from Napster using their NTG service. I can download their DRM protected WMA files and play them as much as I want. As long as I maintain my account with Napster I can download and play as much music as I want. I can also copy that music to my DRM enabled Creative Zen Micro music player and listen to it there.

The trouble is that the Napster service is glitchy and there are times when it won't allow me to play music. Also, I have to sync my Zen Micro once a month or it stops playing the music. WMA files are bigger than mp3s and drain the battery faster when they are played.

So I recently found a program called tunebite. It lets me record the analog stream from my sound card to an mp3. Essentially it defeats the DRM in Napsters WMA files. I'm not too concerned about that because I don't intend to cancel my account with Napster any time soon. I consider it a fair use situation because I've had so many problems using the Napster service as they intend and their support is terrible.

Using the MP3s on my Zen Micro also means I can load up almost twice as many songs and my battery will last almost twice as long.

So back to my question... Is WinAmp still good? I've heard somewhere that's it's kind of become bloatware. I just want to play mp3s while I work so I want a player that takes up as few resouces as possible. I also don't want to use WMP because I use that to manage my WMA files and I want to keep it's catalog to strictly that content.

[Nowhere]

On windows - foobar2000 with a bit of minimalistic interface?
And there also is Musikcube or something like that, supposedly nice and with little bloat.

[az]

Winamp is better than it ever was. It was VERY bad when it was Winamp 3. Winamp 5, though, combines the best of v2 and v3 (thus 2+3=5): It is almost as small and fast as v2, includes a media library (best thing since filesystems to happen to mp3 navigation) and supports the "modern" skins (which allow radically changing Winamp's appearance and behaviour, even features).

If you want it as fast as possible, you can still use classic skins (which use less CPU cycles than modern skins, though on a reasonably fast machine the default modern skin - which is very nice - never uses double-digit percentages of CPU time, either. Hint: If you choose the modern skin, there is a color theme named "Good ol' Winamp", which is much nicer on the eyes than the new standard color theme, IMHO).

[Topha]

I still use winamp, and I like it. You can install it with only the old skin, if you like. Doesn't hog too much resources for me, and my notebook is quite slow.

Also, I like the new media library they have. But I guess its also because I got so used to it, everything else would seem weird

[Nowhere]

I'll just add to what az said that IMHO the best thing that happened to media players since media libraries is integration with last.fm/audioscrobbler, etc. Example of it is Muine with Ruffle plugin. Not only I like it's "normal", "standard" behaviour of building playlists solely by searching, but Ruffle can build a playlist of specified lenght based on few tracks already played :> (and can use last.fm database in the process, so it's damn good)
One minus - runs only where Gnome can run :/

[az]

Media Player Classic is the best video player there is, IMHO, but I wouldn't use it for music. It can't even do playlists.

Nowhere, if there is a player for windows with some form of organization even better (or usefully interesting) than a media library/database, would you please point me to it? There is nothing wrong with Winamp or the ML, I just think managing music is an interesting and not as easy task as it may sound.

[VJ]

On windows - foobar2000 with a bit of minimalistic interface?

Foobar is nice, and has nice features for dealing with batch jobs or group edits; but while doing so it can mess up ID3 tags: if you exceed the length of a V1.1 tag, it does something weird (dunno what exactly, doesn't appear to be type2) without warning .
This has caused my car-MP3 player to no longer recognize the tags...
(and it took my quite some time to get my MP3s tags back in order)

Winamp doesn't allow you to exceed the length, unless you let it to (after which it switches to V2.0 tags).


Jörg

[Rakido]

Media Player Classic is the best video player there is, IMHO, but I wouldn't use it for music. It can't even do playlists.

CTRl + 7 is your friend, Az

[Nowhere]

az, unfortunatelly I don'y know. MIght be a reason for me switching to Linux trully...

[Sciascia]

Another vote for foobar 2000. It can be real minimalistic, but you can tweak it to whatever level you want. I prefer it because it allows you to resample and use ASIO audio. Just last night I programmed my Contour Shuttle controller for it and can do all kinds of neat stuff from scrolling playlists to scrubbing. There are more than a few addons for it and tons of guides for doing what you want.

It is by far the most customizable, best sounding and free player out there.

[Nowhere]

[Rant]
But is it really all one could expect from computer audio player? Foobar is very good at what it does...and that's basically beeing glorified, very good Hi-Fi available for everyone.
But computers could allow for so much more...I think Muine shows the beginning of that trend. I'd really like to simply listen to music I like, nothing more, no searching/selecting/manually building playlists.
[/Rant]

[schmosef]

I've tried WinAMP now. I don't like the interface. I'm going to try Foobar next.

[az]

You could always try iTunes, but it's not exactly easy on the CPU.

[schmosef]

I like WMP's ability to scan a directory for songs and build a catalog. Then allow me to choose artists or albums and add them to the current play list.

Unless I'm missing something, with WinAMP it seemed like I needed to make my playlist ahead of time. Same with foobar. Am I indeed missing something? Maybe there's a plug-in I should be using?

[schmosef]

You could always try iTunes, but it's not exactly easy on the CPU.

I'm gonna skip iTunes. I hate that it's bundled with QuickTime now. And I hate how QuickTime crashes constantly. I guess it must work well on Mac but on WinXP it's terrible.