It's called Foobar.

It doesn't play video. It only plays audio.

I downloaded it and tried it out, and I love it.

It's simple, fast, easy, & compatible w/ MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, & CDDA

On my DAW this is the only media player i have installed. No video or DVD content touches it. It's solely for music production, so this app fits the bill exactly, and it doesn't do a bunch of secret background activity.

Anybody else tried this? Every thread I've seen about media players has tons of mentions of iTunes, which I've always hated. I used WinAmp before this, but for some reason, i like this a lot better.

I recommend people using music-specific DAWs to try it out. It's a free download.

I don't typically need to convert audio files, but if i do, it's always going to be MP3's for the internet, in whcih case, i just transfer the files via pen drive to the internet computer & convert them there before uploading.

I like it so much because it fits my needs & nothing more. I like minimalism.

Take care

Props to Foobar. I don't have it on this machine but I've used it before and I found it as you described.


For video, I'm liking VLC. It's small, light on its feet, and has a slug of options neglected by most of the major players.

I was especially annoyed when my $30 Quicktime Pro wouldn't play an Mp4 for no reason I could figure out. Except that it's 6.5. Which I bought partially on Apple's hype that it would be a gateway to Mp4. But Mp4 apparently was not implemented until QT 7.

Price to update my $30 QT 6.5 to 7?

$30 all over again.


VLC beats the fanny pack off that crappy POS Quicktime Pro as a player.

theblue1 - thanks for the heads up on VLC, i'm going to check it out.

another plus of Foobar: the icon image is sluttier than any others i've seen

actually foobar is a superb conversion tool; by the best one i've come across yet, and i've tried them all.

quite a bitch to set up initially, as you have to tangle with command line encoders and such, but totally worth it.

So i downloaded VLC, and installed it, and I could tell just by the options it gives you upon installation that it's a well designed program.

VLC rules just like Foobar. Thanks theblue1!

Have you guys figured out how to manage the output volume on either foobar or VLC?

So what am I missing out on by using Windows Media Player?

press + or - when the window is highlighted to change the volume in foobar.

regards

I was the DJ at a wedding last week, so I had to prepare an enormous amount of MP3s... I ripped all of my CDs, and had to extract and download (don't tell anyone) a LOT of individual MP3s that the guests wanted to hear.

So I needed a media player capable of organizing all this stuff in playlists so that I wouldn't spend 10 minutes looking for the next song to play. With the ID3 tags, I used the Genre a lot... For example, if a song was African Reggae, I wrote "Worldbeat Reggae" in the Genre. I wanted it to appear in both the Worldbeat playlist and the Reggae playlist.

And I have to admit, Itunes is the best that I could find for my needs.
It has Smart Playlists where you can say "If Genre contains the word Reggae, then add the song to the Reggae Playlist.

With media player, you can't do that, and if you have, for example, a "Worldbeat Reggae" song, a "Worldbeat" song, a "Reggae" song, and a "Ska Reggae" song, they all appear as 4 seperate genres, you have no way of making the song appear in user-defined playlists automatically, unless you create the lists song-by-song.

So, for huge collections, my vote goes to Itunes for its organizational possibilities.

But if there was a non-mega-corporation player that did better, I'd switch.