Media Player of choice (and Medium)?

[Hellser]

With threads asking 'what is your favorite...' - food, hero, gun, demons from hell. How about something that can be beneficial overall to help others find a Music Player that they might like.

What is your favorite Music Player? I don't mean that physical cassette tape or vinyl player you might have. I am talking about digital audio. Bits, bytes, and hertz, oh my.

There's a ton of options out there; foobar2000, Winamp, AIMP3 (or AIMP4), XMPlay, MusicBee and so on. While we're on the subject, what format do you store your medium? Do you want that pristine FLAC file or maybe you're like me and use OGGs instead of MP3s? Share your thoughts - and most importantly, share what you use as your music player.

On the same breath, maybe you could explain why you're using that music player. Does it have an option you like or do you simply like the looks? Share, share, share!

Edit: Changed from Music to Media. What do you use for videos? VLC, MPC-HC or something else?
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I am using AIMP4 at the moment. The skins they have are mediocre and Winamp-like. I am currently using one named 4x to match my Windows 10 system. It has a built-in audio converter which does all the converting that I ever need. It also has MIDI support (BASSMIDI). It does what I need it to do, but I wouldn't mind switching to something else that's worthwhile.

My songs are all in 8 quality OGGs. I find it to be the best quality / size ratio. I tend to avoid touching MP3s wherever possible.

[comet1337]

someone suggested me foobar2000 here on the forums. it's nice, small and simple. i just drag some songs from my music folders to the player and hit play
i have my music in mp3 because my phone is an old PoS that doesn't recognize anything else. too bad they break looping

[Nevander]

My music player of choice is WMP. That's right. Good 'ol Windows Media Player. I play MP3s and MIDIs with it, but it can't play FLAC or OGG. When I get music in those formats, I just convert to MP3 with Audacity if I'm going to be listening to them often. WMP is nice and simple and just plays the files. I don't need a music player program that also organizes. I handle that with good folder organization and M3Us for playlists.

For normal music (random songs, whatever) I always do MP3 and 128kbps. I like to keep them clear of metadata tags, no artwork embedded, and make sure there's no audio clipping. I follow a standard naming convention of "Artist Name - Song Name.mp3." That bitrate also ensures the file size stays low. Usually a five minute song will be around the same size, about 5 MB. Works great. I don't like seeing 15 MB for a 5 minute song. Kinda absurd.

For music that I download or care about it may already come as 320kbps and with all the fancy metadata so I might leave it be, sometimes I've edited them with Audacity and re-exported because I'm OCD.

For game mods I always do OGG at 0 quality. Yea I know, 0. But to me I don't hear a quality drop between 0 and 10. Maybe I need my ears checked but I honestly can't tell a difference. Same thing with MP3 and 128 vs 320. Literally no difference.

In Audacity and Windows alike I always work at 48000 Hz. If I have the frequencies different anywhere (speakers, stereo mix, Audacity) I get this weird sound effect on all my audio.

[Marrub]

I use XMPlay. I was previously using foobar2000, but the lack of a nice browser made me switch.
Has a lot of options for tracker music. Has plugins for every format I've wanted to play.
Has an awesome Amiga skin, has searching. And that's really all I need.
Additionally, I can reroute the output so Virtual Audio Cable works fine with it. So that's nice.
I prefer music in V0 MP3, 192+ CBR is fine. I don't care much for quality, my headphones (as nice as they are) and my sound card (as not-existing as it is) do not benefit from anything higher.
I do have some music in FLAC, though. Either because I couldn't get it in any other format (and was too lazy to convert it) or just wanted the sentiment of having it in such a ridiculously large format.
Since XMPlay also supports Opus, I usually convert any lossless music I have to that.

[Oberron]

WMP for Wave/MP3 files, XMplay for MOD tracker songs.

[Beed28]

Winamp. With the right plugins, I can play almost every video game music format on it, and I made a rather neat Mega Man themed music visualization on it to boot.

[Viscra Maelstrom]

foobar is great. i remember using Winamp a long time ago, but it became incredibly sluggish as my library grow more monstrous in size. foobar however has no such issues, and there's plugins to play a bunch of video-game formats too (although XMPlay's plugins are of significantly better quality.) the only downside is that the MIDI plugin does not use GM for playback.

for movies, Media Player Classic is great and doesn't fuss around. you can even run DVDs with it and, i assume, Blurays as well. definitely had a significantly better experience with it than say, VLC.

[Hellser]

for movies, Media Player Classic is great and doesn't fuss around. you can even run DVDs with it and, i assume, Blurays as well. definitely had a significantly better experience with it than say, VLC.

Recently switched to MPC myself. VLC was taking too long to start.

[BFG]

VLC plays any region DVDs and strange file formats, downside is lines go through the video if you pause it.
GOMplayer - loads of cool effects, was able to mute voices in movies and only have the background music playing, which is interesting.

[Caligari87]

VLC plays any region DVDs and strange file formats, downside is lines go through the video if you pause it.

Sounds like a system issue on your side, I've never experienced anything like that.

[zrrion the insect]

I've been using clementine recently for music and vlc for video.

[wildweasel]

Foobar2000 is the player for me. Lightweight enough to put on every machine I own, powerful enough to mass-tag things, and stable enough to not commit suicide when I feed it my library of 31,518 songs. Most of them are MP3, a handful are OGG, M4A, or FLAC. I use MP3 not out of any real advantages (because let's be honest, it hasn't got any) but because a lot of external devices just plain don't support the OGG or FLAC files. I'm also not enough of an audiophile to be able to tell the difference between a 320 kbps MP3 and a FLAC file.

[Marisa the Magician]

There are only two for me: MPV and MPD.

The former is basically THE media player. Covers pretty much everything without having to deal with codec packs, splitters, renderers, etc.
The latter is just there for music alone, I can just have it running in the background at all times, it's a "music player daemon" after all. Pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. Shame it doesn't support some formats XMPlay did back when I used it (mostly obscure ones though).

I'm getting too used to things that have no GUIs. I guess this is what it's like to be a long-time Linux user.

[Dancso]

Winamp for music, VLC for films

Winamp may be old but i like that it has built-in visualization, I occasionally use it on my side monitor while programming, it's feels nice.

[cambertian]

I just play songs through Youtube like a complete music pleb. (not sarcasm)

What's a OGG? (sarcasm)