Best music playing software

witnessmenow

I'm getting a bit tired of how bloated apple are making itunes, neither my laptop or my Pc are getting any newer.

For just playing a few songs I'd normally use Winamp or something, but for a storing and playing all my music I use Itunes. The reason I use two is im not a big fan of Winamps library function, then if you leave itunes as your default music player it adds songs to your library when you click on them (and Im a bit OCD about my music collection )

There is a feature of itunes i like though so it would be great if your suggestions had this. When I add a song to my library from my download folder say it copies it into my music folder automatically. Its not a dealbreaker if it doesnt have this function though.

So basically im looking for the least resource hungry music library and music playing software

Cheers.

cormie

witnessmenow wrote: »

I'm getting a bit tired of how bloated apple are making itunes, neither my laptop or my Pc are getting any newer.

For just playing a few songs I'd normally use Winamp or something, but for a storing and playing all my music I use Itunes. The reason I use two is im not a big fan of Winamps library function, then if you leave itunes as your default music player it adds songs to your library when you click on them (and Im a bit OCD about my music collection )

There is a feature of itunes i like though so it would be great if your suggestions had this. When I add a song to my library from my download folder say it copies it into my music folder automatically. Its not a dealbreaker if it doesnt have this function though.

So basically im looking for the least resource hungry music library and music playing software

Cheers.

Would you consider just storing in folders?

Music:
>Albums
>Non Album Tracks
>>Albums\Artist\
>>Non Album Tracks\onehitwondersingle.mp3
>>>Albums\Artist\Album Title - CD1\Track Title.MP3

and just use enqueue in winamp on whatever you want to listen to? It's a lot less messy. When you download something, just sort it into the correct folder and you're done.

Does itunes actually duplicate the file, or just make a shortcut? Either way, sounds a bit much, but if it actually copies the file, meaning your music collection is taking up double the space it could be, that's a bit mad!

witnessmenow

Say I have an album downloaded in my donwload folder:

download/Boardsiesalbum_SHARE/track*.mp3

I click add folder in itunes, point it to this folder and it adds it to my library, it also copeis the music to my library folder in the following format

music/Artist name/Album/trackname.mp3

So its all i have to do is delete the one in the download folder, Its nice and orgainsed in just a few clicks

alansweeney100

Windows media player 12 was supposed to be released before 2009
Mayb thats worth a look. Can't find a link to beta download or a official release date, Some genius Supergoogler here will find you a link no doubt

An Fear Aniar

You could try a free Open Source player like Songbird:

http://getsongbird.com/

or

maybe a media centre like XBMC

http://www.xbmc.org

or Elisa

http://elisa.fluendo.com/home/


.

Black_Knight

Yeah I think Itunes does make a duplicate of the folder. You can just delete the original afterwards, ie keep your download folder empty after updating your library.

I use XBMC the odd time im listening to music (he says while currently using VLC player). Takes up about 40mb of memory, runs pretty smooth. All ive to do is dump my folder of an album into a set folder (eg. music folder) and then point the music menu of XBMC to that "music" folder. XBMC automatically adds those albums to its library which basically just gets album artwork, infor on the band/ on the album and thats that.

I store my albums as filename: <Artist name> - <Album name>
It makes it handier for XBMC and for me to find an artists album

Edit: I got XBMC because I also use it to catalog all my movies. Ive so many that I just dont watch because ive either forgotten about them or I cant remember what its about, so XBMC gives me a synopsys of the movie. Taken from IMDB.com.

witnessmenow

Downloaded Song bird and XBMC will try them later.

BTW I'm actually happy with winamp being my default music player

Playing a song in winamp(no library function) was using just over 3,000k of memory

Playing a song in itunes(with its library function) uses nearly 100,000K of memory, some difference!

Black_Knight

XBMC, playing my 100 top songs. Just started it there and its on 38,000K of memory.
--
Onto the 3rd song now, 42000K memory

calex71

tried song bird myself recently looks nice and has potential but it could not handle 20,000 + songs, and froze repeatedly when browsing throught it or searching

Jonathan

Have you tried foobar2000?

tman

Try going into Winamp's preferences (ctrl+p)
Down to media library > local media, then click on the "watch folders" tab
There should be an option to automatically add played files

I personally don't bother with that, whenever I add new music to my music folders, I click the library button in winamp and choose to rescan folders (which you can set up in the above mentioned screen)

Winamp pisses all over iTunes, even the iPod support is now good enough for me to not even consider installing iTunes on my new laptop
It may take a bit of getting used to, but I urge you to stick with Winamp (and try the Bento skin if you don't already use it)

galwayguy22

I like J. River Media Center

http://www.jrmediacenter.com/

biko

I use Winamp for mp3 and Gomplayer for everything else, videos and such.

witnessmenow

Have been trying out songbird, its quite nice. Automatically added all my itunes library which is pretty nice.

Its mega Ram hungry though, @ 180,000K its using nearly twice as much as itunes. Its seems less processor hungry than itunes though.

Seems playback kind of skips every now and again with it though.

I'll be trying out XBMC next, I'll let you know how i get on