Just because everything works, it doesn't mean you should stop looking for something that might suit your tastes better. With that in mind, we've collected some of the most useful, functional and less publicized media players available.

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/2007/1 [...] index.html

While Songbird looks interesting, it also consumes the entire screen easily.

Take Winamp, if you use the library it won't take up the whole screen. If you hide the library, you're left with the same space as an IM window. I haven't found a format that Winamp won't play, with most of my non-MP3s being in FLAC, APE, AAC.

Then again, I'm an advocate of using Folders. You can arrange them however you want -- group them by genre then band, or just group by band and have assorted song grouped by genre. Whatever you want, it's how you'll know where your music is. Same with video, group them by type of video or by genre, whatever you want. I know my video collection keeps rotating so often a library based video player would be useless (I tend to burn things quickly, despite >1TB capacity, or delete things I've seen and don't need to see again), so folder based approach let's me easily find what I want. Plus, Vista makes it easy to put the root folder for your videos right in the left navigation bar, just have to open up your hard drive.

You guys totally dropped the ball by not including or even mentioning Mediamonkey

I never was a fan of WMP or iTunes and I never understood why people seem to like them so much. They are bloated and useless programs. I have always been a fan of using winamp (the earlier lightweight versions) coupled with windows explorer to find files to queue in my playlist. As a result, for Linux systems I prefer XMMS or Audacious over something huge and bloated like Amarok. I Just don't understand why people feel that it is necessary to integrate so much into an audio player. At most you need a control interface and a playlist window that you can bring up and close at will. Having a file browser and web browser integrated is just redundant and silly.

As for video playback, props to the article for mentioning Media player classic. VLC is alright, but i like MPC better. Also, by far the most flexible video playback program i've encountered is MPlayer (it runs in Linux and Windows) and it plays EVERYTHING right out of the box, which is great.

I think all of those programs easily beat the crap out of bloated and worthless programs like WMP and iTunes. Check out the above programs when you can, and I promise you won't regret it

-Zorak

Here's more about Songbird (v0.3 Release Candidate 2, as of 23 Oct.), from the horse's mouth - er, bird's beak:

"Songbird™ is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins/feathers. Like Firefox®, it is built from Mozilla®, cross-platform and open source."

"Cross Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux; 45+ languages; 64-bit support"

"Developer Friendly: 30+ Songbird add-ons; Author an add-on; Songbird developer roost"

"Anything, Anywhere: Use an iPod, USB device; Play tracks from iTunes; Store, Yahoo! Unlimited"

(I took slight liberties with the punctuation...)

Here's a link to their site: http://songbirdnest.com/ . I hope this is helpful, folks. (I have not tried it yet...) Cheers!

- Valvicus

The biggest advantage of MPC over VLC has to be the ability to add more codecs and view softsubs without problems. VLC is known for problems with that.

If you want to watch non-native shows, like anime or just something subbed, it's very good. Hardsubs are still used a lot, but with the H264 it's getting more used.

Maybe things changed, I don't follow the media players a lot. I just have to say I ussually use Zoomplayer

Winamp for all audio...

MPC(my fav once configured up right, i encode all my own stuff in Mpeg4) and VLC(quicktime, 3GP, and real video) for everything else(for DVD's I use power DVD)....Windows media player does not bug me at all tho i still use it for general short videos...

Hey soory to bring this in but I think it's only fair to mention there are even more players out there. Yes more, just look towards Linux and all the media players that was written for it. There are a ton of them just for audio, Amarok, xmms, noatum, juk, audacious, rymthbox, and so many others. For all around media players you have again more than i can list but here are some Kaffeine, Mplayer, Xine, mpg123 , mpg321, and the list goes on. For Audio I use Amarok , all my files are on a windows machine and my linux box has a samba mount point to the music folder then Amarok is link to it. Amarok is a get application, it gathers info on the band, the song , lyrics, and album art automatically. For most other media applicitions i use Xine , Mplayer , or Kaffeine just depends on how I feel that day.
I understand that there is more windows users out there than Linux users but are numbers are growing. well that my two cents, you can find more information about Linux media players ar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categ [...] ia_players


thanks

Maybe a useful read for someone who has never thought about using anything other than WMP, but when I saw the number of alternatives presented I skipped reading the article.

I may be wrong but I am guessing the average Tom's hardware reader has already tried twice that many media players. I have a wider selection than that currently installed.

A follow up article with expanded coverage and a feature chart at the end might prove very popular. I would definitely read it.

I would agree with TeknoJnky. MediaMonkey is a fantastic program, especially for people who have an IPod and like me cannot stand to use that bloatware POS Itunes.

definately should have included the new winamp 5.5 and its new skin interface

Wow, I had just recently switched to foobar2000 and vlc. The best part about foobar is that I could match the Musicmatch library functionality with a couple plugins and some tweaking, but without the horrible Musicmatch bloat.

Songbird is still way too early in development to be a serious consideration. It's bloated, slow, and a resource hog, and it's only on like version 0.3. The blog searching capability is pretty cool, though, for finding new music, but I imagine once they're big enough, the RIAA will sue them into oblivion for it.