Quote:
Originally Posted by djabstraction
Windows Media Player for me. I only use another player if I really need to and that is very rare as you can get a directshow filter to play pretty much anything these days so WMP can support it.
I'm not a fan of WinAmp mainly because of that horrid settings dialog. Seriously, that thing conforms to no design guidelines whatsoever, it's like a big hole for throwing random settings in. I know some geeks open it and go WOW! Look at all those settings, this must be good... no actually, that kind of thing is usually done because the application has a habbit of going wrong so it gives the user a way of resolving the issue, rather than them writing more reliable code. 
Years ago I used to use Sonique as the interface was so fast on slower systems and it was the only one that enabled me to listen to MP3 without crashing at the time, WinAmp was only on like version 78,000 at the time so it was still in pretty early development from what it's at now. Then they promised us Sonique 2, but they took so long getting anywhere with it that they just got left behind and I doubt it will ever be finished.
So WMP gets my vote  |
I've something strange with Windows Media Player (WMP)... Sometimes it plays mp3-files and streams without nagging... But some other times it doesn't play these quite standard audiofiles at all
Furthermore I'm always looking for options that were there earlier, but disappeared. I can't find the desired options there easily, mostly; but I can be wrong ofcourse
Winamp really plays everything it supports... It works really always here and is very useful with a bunch of old plugins
I'm already accustomed to the diverse options in that preferences-menu...
It's indeed somewhat counterintuitive (when you click a checkmark, or under 'output' a line, it's applied instantly; there's no 'ok' or 'apply' button or so) and I understand that it's therefore difficult for a beginning user. Maybe they should make a button 'advanced' where the rather difficult options can be hidden under. But I'm not complaining,
I must confess that I don't like the new skins and the media library... I think they've made that thing to compete with Itunes and so. It can be handy, but I'm not using it much, only for a podcast subscription. (you can configure the program that it downloads a podcast show when it's made available, that's the only thing I used from that screen)
There are also other alternatives available that support the/some plugins for winamp, for example XMPlay. Can be handy! My winamp has currently so many plugins that it starts a bit slow, I think with XMPlay - and then only using the important plugins only - this 'problem' can be solved.
Btw. Sonique - in the early days - mostly crashed here (in that time I used Win 98). I liked the funny interface of the program.
I've never used it again...
Regards!
BTW... my winamp, with some additional (old) plugins thus, supports the following filetypes:
(Just overtyped from the file types thing under preferences)
669
AVI AMF AAC APL AIFF AU AVR ASF ASX
BONK B4S
CDA CUE CAF
FLAC FLV FAR
HTK
KAR
IT ITZ IFF
MPG MPEG M2V MID MIDI MIZ MOD MDZ MTM MP3 MP2 MP1 M4A MP4 M1V MP2V MPE MPV2 MPA MPV MAT MP+ M3U M3U8
NST NSV NSA
OKT OGG
PTM PAF PVF PLS
QT
RMI RAM RMM RA RNX RMX RV RM RMJ RPM RT RAW
STM STZ S3M S3Z SMI SMIL SD2 SDS SF
ULT
VQF VOC
W64 WAV WMA WMV WPL
XM XMZ XI
Linear Mode
