Best music software for windows 7?

I'm sure this has been asked to death but i couldn't find any topics for windows with the search feature.

what is the best software to play music on windows 7 in your opinion and why? im really sick of iTunes, how bloated it is, how long it takes to start up, etc.

 

For myself, I like iTunes (no, I don't have an iPod). I like the built in internet radio, and don't like mixing around with multiple programs that do the same thing. On the other hand, WMP does have the SRS WOW feature, which I do miss in Itunes.

 

winamp. Startup time is a little long but nowhere near as brutal as itunes. It's like firefox; although it takes a bit to start, once it's up, its the best.

 

I use AIMP2.

-fast startup
-better sound
-low on resources

 

Windows Media Player.
Very good music library management, very good startup time, Simply looks good.

 

WMP12 gets my vote.
- Nice ways to view and navigate library -- not a bunch of panes like with iTunes.
- View/edit playlist side-by-side with library view -- don't have to keep switching back and forth as with iTunes.
- Sync with MTP and MSC/UMS devices.
- Supports MP3, WMA, and AAC codecs (maybe others?).
- Integration with various third-party programs (e.g. Amazon MP3 Downloader).
- Handles video and photos too, as a nice bonus feature.

 

foobar2000 has very light system resource usage and starts in less than a second, even with my extensive customizations and addons.

Windows Media Player 12, the built-in media player, is pretty good as well.

 

I use WMP with the Shark007 Codec pack. Looks nice, fast startup, no lag playing files, doesn't crash, and will literally play any format you want. I don't think there's any reason to use a third party App for music and video anymore, which is awesome.

 

same for me..but i use the klite codec pack
works well indeed

 

I'm a fan of MediaMonkey; it has very good music library management and is simple to setup and use. They offer a free version which is more than plenty for what most would need, but you can also buy their gold edition that has some extras.

 

I was a sworn winamp user, super light weight, plays anything. But over the years its gotten more bloated (though you can always just use a setting to run it in classic mode)

But in the last 4 months I came across Song Bird, its now what I use all the time because it has the best music organization features have seen, some pretty cool plugins and large cover art too.

Foobar2000 I think can be used very similar but requires manual tweaking to get the desired effects and I was never able to get anything desirable out of foobar2000.

Songbird like Itunes also syncs music with your devices, its one of the few that I know works with my Nokia N900 but I actually dont use the sync function I just use mass storage mode and do drag & drop.

If you try out songbird make sure to enable the multi tab browsing, then it turns it into this great filter like music player. You can pick by artist album or genre and have it filter in real time any combination of selections.

 

I also tried Songbird, but gave up on it since it couldn't sync my ipod. It also uses a lot of resources. But that's to be expected with the built-in browser.

 

I use Foobar2000 for main listening, and Windows Media Player 12 when I feel like shuffling or using the Visualizations, and for playing newly downloaded somgs (Since I don't feel like making foobar the default music program).

One of the things about foobar is that you do have to find a layout you like and that works for you, but everything inside of the program window is customizable; although I've yet to figure out how themes work for it :|

 

Hmm I heard its resource heavy but I cant even get it to hardly show any cpu/ram use for me and I have like a 2000 song collection.

I do have high spec equipment though I suppose. Surprised it cant pair with the ipod, it seems to pair with like everything. You may just need to download a plugin from there home page.

Like Blaze I use two players, If I just wanted to open one file or a set of files in a folder like something I just ripped and had not tagged yet and moved to my media folder or if I want visualizations I use winamp. Milkdrop 2 is a great visual.

 

to actually listen to music, i use mostly media center. it's in the living room, where it's fun to listen to music.

to manage my library, i use itunes (to shop, to rip, to clean up other-sourced tracks), which is then synched over home server, and accessed by the media center.

to quickly listen to some individual file, i just use windows media player.

 

You poor person,

lol I cant stand WMP dont like MWC too much ether bad experience trying to use that as the core of my HTPC when it cant handle half the movie codecs I threw at it, especially not those with subs or dual audio. It would be way more cumbesome and slow to navigate using the WMC interface with my large collection I have now vs songbirds tab system or foobar if its setup correctly.

 

well, your choice. WMP and WMC work absolutely flawless, fast and great in my case. granted, i have a 100% legal collection => it's most likely much smaller than what most others have.

oh, and WMC works great with ANY video or audio codec for me. again, only using legal sources reduces the amount of requirements one puts to the system.

and i can tell you, my system beats yours by a big margin

so no, don't feel like i'm a poor person i evaluated different stuff, and this is where i got to by now. and i know why. updates will follow, i'm at finalisation of my home setup, then pics and explanations will follow. just to brag

 

The problem with WMC is it requires windows registered codecs or something like that and thus for a 64bit windows OS it requires a 64bit codec. At the time I built my HTPC there were and may not be still many of the needed codecs in a registered 64bit version so even though players like VLC or MPC can play the files fine WMC would not.

Most of that could have been remedied by using a 32bit OS maybe, but even still it was a lot of tweaking and hacking stuff to make it all work. I though WMC would be easy and fast but nobody in the family wanted to use it even though I had everything setup & of course a nice remote. The HTPC ended up being my step dads new computer when his died I gave it to him. Sad my HTPC was better than his old computer

Where the heck did "my system beats yours by a big margin" come from? I dont recall asking nor starting a competition. (that may sound rude lol, its not intended to be)

WMP definitely is a lot slower to start and has less support than say MPC for me. I use hard drives I think you use a SSD for everything so that may be why you do not notice the lag of that program.

Also even though your collection is 100% legal (again nobody was really asking as we should assume everybody has a 100% legal collection, its very rude to accuse somebody of stealing and will probably spawn off topic talk of piracy that we know is a touchy subject here) I have many 100% legal rips in formats like .FLAC & .APE and these odd formats throw curve balls at the stock windows programs.

I have a nice automated cd rip setup it creates a flac for backup and aac file for my phone.

Well anyways I have songbird open now, playing all my "symphonic rock" genre tracks. Time to move over one chair to the work computer and get some work done.

 

On a side note - what's wrong with Windows Media Player?

Ever since I moved to my SSD I stuck with it...

(I did play with Foobar before... and Creative Media Source... learned to hate Winamp on my old laptop where it was a resource hog (was a 1,6Pentium M, 512MB RAM at the time, XP, a long time ago))

 

I've yet to figure out a way to get Windows Media Center to play most of my MKV's, would make a nice setup for the anime club, but, yeah.

 

Yeah your in the same boat as me, I wanted to let my kids watch good cartoons

I could get them to play with some WMC hacks/plugins but only play the video it would not play the subtitles or let me select the audio track on dual audio.

What I had to do was for anime break out the wireless mouse & keyboard and just open them in media player classic.

Had I known all the neat wiimote hacks I know now back then I could have also used the wiimote to do all that and it would have been a lot more like a remote.

 

failure one: deploying a 64bit os where it doesn't need to be (which is why i still don't have ANY 64bit os. applications, codecs, drivers etc are still moving towards 64bit as the standard, till then, i stay on what is reliable and trusted.. there's no gain in 64bit, except the ram)

nah, but your previous post was quite rude, showing some from of "my solution is better than yours" competition

actually MPC is slower when used over network, to f.e. playback flv videos on the home server. much slower. WMP is much better at streaming. that is, on win7. with hdd or ssd, it is in both cases faster. esp. over network.

i know about nobody i've met in my life so far that has a legal music collection.. and from the numbers of tracks i see some are posting that are still at universities, and the renaming issues they post, etc, i KNOW they don't have legal sources. they couldn't afford them. last support call i got was "itunes opens slow, and i only have 250000 tracks in"...

cd.. how last millenium
well, flac is all nice and dancy, but not supported by any vendor, which is why i would never use it. both aac and wma, supported on about any device, allow lossless compression for backup. or i would just create isos from my cds, for the backup. and only use the aac version myself. but to each it's own.

i'm done with using flac, ogg, and all those nice codeces. i LOVE them, but they will never get real support. makes my life more complicated for nothing.


mkv in media center should work fine with the shark win7 codec package. or, if not, at least with "my movies" for media center. nice plugin, really adds a lot of "wow".

to vicious: two little joky things: good cartoons and you want to give them anime? ... and, mkv? animes? leeeegally? i think that would be a worlds first

 

If you're looking for something super light like the old winamp, I use SpiderPlayer. It's very light on system resources, but not very feature-ful.

 

I'm good with Windows Media Player also ^_^

Also I didn't know iTunes hd a built in Radio thingie... do any other media players have that? It'd be cool to have one app rather than 2 to do stuff(or use internet radio in a browser).

 

Try AIMP2 youll never go back.

 

Not enough mediamonkey love in the world, it is, in my opinion, the greatest music library software in the world

 

I'll be honest, I'm liking WMP12.

Just saying.

 

Songbird, has the best integration of Shoutcast radio of all media players I've seen.

 

Already tried the ipod plugin. Doesn't work. They stopped developing that plugin.

 

sony, knowing how to master? they ARE the godfathers of the loudness war to up their sales. and philips is most likely no better.

*hugs itunes, hugs windows 7, hugs not having to hazzle with such issues*

and this is why having friends or a community with similar interests could help.. by showing you stuff that you might like. so far, even i succeeded, while being from a completely different musical background.

but in short, isn't that your general problem? you never know what you like if you don't actually try stuff out.

 

No one use Zune software?

 

I use it along with Songbird.

 

Windows Media Player has it too. It's in the media guide section i believe.

 

Windows Media Player 12 64-bit all the way.
Or
Zune software.

I used to use WMP11 (Vista not XP edition), and then WMP12 when I switch to WIn7. WHen I got a Zuen I went with Zune software. both are great software.
The Zune software is more like iTunes, feature wise. It run smoothly even on very slow systems. iTunes requires 60 super computers working together to start to be usable.

 

Only while Syncing

 

indeed i hope so. they should open the zunestore to anyone using windows. so we can just buy tracks for usage in our home network (media center, pc, laptop.. zune.. phone). itunes works great for that, even without ipod. i'd like to see another option of a shop-app that delivers one click buying, auto download. competition is always great.

edit: if apple would rewrite itunes to integrate to windows like this, though.. http://five-g.deviantart.com/art/iTunes-Aero-for-Windows-Vista-96929293

 

What about Amazon? (never tried it myself - and you have Beatport too Dave )

 

beatport is flash *shudder*. amazon is a webapp which i hate.

you never used itunes yet, so you don't know how easy it is compared to having to manually browse, click, buy, download, add to a library/folderstructure, etc.

in itunes, it's one click, done. this sort of solution is what i want from applications. they should serve me, not me having to work to get them to do what i want.

edit: and beatport is just for electronic music, focused on mixes for djs.

 

By that analogy, in the Soviet Union you should denounce neighbours to be in the government's "good books" and in East Germany you should co-operate with the Stasi...

If you cannot stand a company you just don't buy and/or use their products - simple - if you make your voice heard and other people follow it might have an effect - or it might not, depending on the amount of people.

And Apple brings to me ZERO benefit - bad sound quality in MP3s or MP4 (worse than a CD and if you pay for it you'd rather have the best - same as with people who buy DVDs and then compress them even more - same idea - same reason you shoot images in RAW and not JPEG)
Media Player does just fine for music (or if you really want there are other open alternatives) and CDs do fine for music

With maybe 1 or 2 exceptions where I actually liked something from Beatport and that's it...

Amazon I don't use...

I really prefer CDs - ideally bought from Amazon - 8-10 Pounds for a CD is Ok, lower is better - the 17-18€ you get charged in a German shop for a new CD is way too high - especially as classical music costs 5€ per CD... (old recordings remastered) - I doubt they loose money on this - so why do other CDs cost 18€??

And where are we going anyway? Are we heading for a music war here?

 

no. actually we're heading for a "detlev still fails at life as he always only sees the bad things" discussion.

itunes gives me tons of benefits over cds, and i told them before:
- a track i like is bought and put into my library with one click.
- i can chose to buy a full album, or only one or a couple of the tracks that i actually like.
- i can actually get my music back if i somehow lost/killed it all. try that with cds.
- it's more cheap in the end.
- the audio quality is indistinguishable from cd (talk as you want, i have high quality enough systems and much trained ears by now to know that it's just placebo you talk about)
- i get music before it comes out of cd, or even out in my country.
- i have more choices, can buy music i would never find on cd.
- i can preview all those choices easily.


the only thing sad (in switzerland at least) is, there is no other option available delivering the same benefits. which is why i can't wait for the zunestore to pop up.

 

C-c-c-c-combo Breaker!!!

ZUNE SOFTWARE is really good to bad it doesn't sync with my nokia n85.

 

what format does the zune software actually shop? wma? with or without drm? if without, then the n85 should just sync with your music folder without problem (my xperia does this with the itunes folder).

 

Zune uses MP3 with no DRM.
the software just dont sync with anything but a Zune Player or a Zune HD. y just sync my music the old fashion ungeeke way the Nokia software

 

okay. well, i just plug my phone in and it sync with the windows synchronization center. while not itunes integrated, i don't actually ever SEE it syncing anyways so it's fine for me.

not that i use my music on the phone, actually.. but why not, huge collection of ringtones

 

itunes , i used to like WMP but the stock in windows 7 doesn't do the job when it comes to album arts , they appear in weird sizes ( mostly smaller ) , and i really like album arts , and no i don't have an ipod and i am not an apple fan , but i find itunes very good if u have a good organized library ( artist , album , album art ..etc )

 

some screenshots of zune software
i like the new album first
the first one i took it a little while ago
the second one i took it rigth now.

 

nice. i hope they integrate that into media center, would look great there.

 

zunepass is a great service to
all the music you wanna hear and 10 to keep a month

 

SILENCE!!! don't tease me, dude!

 

I use the zune software. However, the only reason I use it is because I like its gui more then media player.