Music player recommendations

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Professor Hastig
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Music player recommendations

Post by Professor Hastig »

I've been using an ancient version of Media Monkey but by now it is clearly showing its age and the current version no longer really appeals to me, thanks to the 'modernized' UI.
Most other software fails by default because to be 'helpful' they follow Apple's bad example and only look at the metadata in the songs which completely scatters my neatly sorted playlist folders and creates a total mess to sort out first.
I also tried foobar2000 but it is too basic and primitive for my needs.

Can anybody recommend be a player with a strong focus on folder-based playback and a somewhat decent feature set? So far I had no luck, they either have a poor feature set or a bloated, unusable UI.
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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by Gez »

Professor Hastig wrote: Fri Jul 07, 2023 1:49 amI also tried foobar2000 but it is too basic and primitive for my needs.
Welp, I got nothing then.
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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by axredneck »

There is a ton of various plugins for foobar2000 for all sort of needs.
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Graf Zahl
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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by Graf Zahl »

I can understand the frustration. Most music software fails to provide even the most basic access to the computer, i.e. open a directory and play its contents.
Foobar2000 takes a special place, though. It's the complete opposite of the mainstream but still fails to do it right. Foobar2000 may have some plugins to improve the experience but in its native state is really as primitive as they come. The least I need is two panes - one for the playlists/folder view and one for the currently open one. But there seems to be no way to configure this. for anything I have to go through Windows file open dialogs. No, thank you. Good software shouldn't rely on plugins to work as it needs to.
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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by Hexereticdoom »

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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by dpJudas »

Graf Zahl wrote: Fri Jul 07, 2023 1:22 pm I can understand the frustration. Most music software fails to provide even the most basic access to the computer, i.e. open a directory and play its contents.
Foobar2000 takes a special place, though. It's the complete opposite of the mainstream but still fails to do it right. Foobar2000 may have some plugins to improve the experience but in its native state is really as primitive as they come. The least I need is two panes - one for the playlists/folder view and one for the currently open one. But there seems to be no way to configure this. for anything I have to go through Windows file open dialogs. No, thank you. Good software shouldn't rely on plugins to work as it needs to.
Although I use foobar2000 myself, I've always sorta hated that application. The UI hasn't evolved even once since the very first time I downloaded it. And that UI is just so ugly! Functionally, it does do what I usually need for playback though (my needs are very simple).

I'm afraid that in general you won't find a quality application for this kind of thing anymore. It is the same as with Email applications. 99% of people found a different way to solve the problem (use a hosted service) and nobody is willing to pay or even invest their development time into solving it themselves. So you're stuck with foobar2000 for audio and Thunderbird for email I fear. Plus both with email and music the services you need to interface with have an financial interest in not improving the situation.
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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by Rachael »

I usually use Winamp, but XMPlay is good too. XMPlay's interface is kinda weird but nothing too horrible. QMMP is a bit of a "FOSS version" of Winamp but it's a lil buggy, but the upshot of that is cross platform support.

There's also Media Player Classic as well which attempts to replicate the simplicity of Windows 3.1's media player but with more features.
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Graf Zahl
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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by Graf Zahl »

Sigh.

3 more to add to the endless list of music players that utterly fail to be user friendly.
QMMP takes the crown, though. Unintuitive UI, no menu and controls so tiny that it is virtually unusable on a HD monitor. Seems to have been made for 640x480 with no provisions for technological advancements.
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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by Hellser »

I used AIMP back in the day, would recommend. Came with a built in converter that did a pretty decent job. It's very Winamp 2.0-era. But I haven't used AIMP in years, having switched to VLC for most audio uses and a streaming service for music.
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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by Graf Zahl »

VLC also lacks any decent UI - just "Open File" in the menu.
AIMP is definitely one of the better choices, if its playlist display wasn't a complete failure. It becomes totally unusable when you got more than 10 playlists or albums.
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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by Xeotroid »

For what it's worth, foobar2000 allows the Library pane to just use a folder hierarchy of a folder you pick. It still builds a library, it's not a normal filesystem browser, so for playing random stuff or sound effects for games I still open those from Windows Explorer – though I don't really find that to be a problem since I already use Explorer to browse those files normally, and I don't need to put them into a playlist. Besides various format plug-ins (VGMs, MIDI, module trackers etc.), I use Columns UI for its dark mode (I think the stock UI supports that too now, though) and the Waveform Seekbar plug-in.

I only use VLC for videos nowadays – no gap-less playback in this day and age is comical, and audio files getting cut off at the end by the length of the cache set in the options makes it annoying to use it for browsing sound effects. The new UI they're planning for 4.0 looks pretty terrible too. Slick, perhaps, but wasteful.
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Graf Zahl
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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by Graf Zahl »

Xeotroid wrote: Sat Jul 08, 2023 12:15 pm I only use VLC for videos nowadays – no gap-less playback in this day and age is comical, and audio files getting cut off at the end by the length of the cache set in the options makes it annoying to use it for browsing sound effects. The new UI they're planning for 4.0 looks pretty terrible too. Slick, perhaps, but wasteful.
It's clearly a movie player that also can play music, not a fully featured music player. Yeah, no gap-less playback is a killer criteria.
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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by inkoalawetrust »

Xeotroid wrote: Sat Jul 08, 2023 12:15 pm I only use VLC for videos nowadays – no gap-less playback in this day and age is comical, and audio files getting cut off at the end by the length of the cache set in the options makes it annoying to use it for browsing sound effects. The new UI they're planning for 4.0 looks pretty terrible too. Slick, perhaps, but wasteful.
Yeah, the lack of clean looping is awful when I look for sound effects from my copies of the GDC audio libraries and game rips. Particularly if the sound in question is super short, which causes some awful effect where it loops weirdly for a few tries, then the sound stops even playing at all.
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Hexereticdoom
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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by Hexereticdoom »

I've found recently this one, it looks very simple and minimalistic, you should check it out:

Album Player
Professor Hastig
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Re: Music player recommendations

Post by Professor Hastig »

Hexereticdoom wrote: Sun Jul 09, 2023 9:09 pm I've found recently this one, it looks very simple and minimalistic, you should check it out:

Album Player

This one requires admin access on Windows which makes it a non-option by default.

It is really disappointing. So many choices and nobody gets the single most important feature an audio player needs right: Why is it impossible to implement a simple folder selection that can be kept open as a separate pane on the main window? All the other features and gimmicks are useless if switching between albums is such a pain in the ass. MediaMonkey is the only one where this seems to be a first class feature, so I guess I will have to do an upgrade.

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