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There are countless audio players available for free all over the Internet, if you have not figured this out yet then you must be new (which is ok too). If you would like to find some of these freebies, you can type "Free mp3 player" into google, or go to www.snapfiles.com or any of the other countless software download web sites and do a search there. My personal favorite is www.mp3j.us
(Yes, it's one of my sites :-)). We only supply links to Audio, Video, Graphics, Flash and other multimedia software.
I have personally tried hundreds of audio players and even written one HERE, some play just mp3 format, some play everything from CDs, mp3, ogg and even ape format.
What to look for in an audio player; Free, no ads, GOOD equalizer, multiple format support, plugin support, ease of use, skinnable, and my personal obsession, nothing running in the system tray when you are not using it. (Taking up cpu and ram that could be doing something else)
Our choices:
Winamp - Can't beat this one, and it shows. Winamp is the most widely used audio player in the world. It has a great equalizer that ranges from 60Hz to 16K, which is typical of a home or car stereo, this feature alone makes it worlds above others that have crap EQs. Winamp is not great for video although it does support most popular video types. When installing, I usually disable video support on it altogether. Particularly
with .wmv format, winamps video tends to skip. But for audio playback, it is our number one choice.
TPlayer - This a great app that displays two decks and boasts many features such as auto dj, fade between songs, a very fast hard drive search for songs and everything is tunable. We use this one to auto dj between our band sets at clubs.
Jet Audio - This application does everything from play audio to broadcasting your own radio station. It also burns, rips, blah and blah. Don't care, just want the player part. I am not going to buy it so I can have yet another burner/ripper/dish do-er. As far as audio playback is concerned, it is as good as winamp, even in the EQ department which I put so much emphasis on. Jet Audio also offers a lyrics window that pops
up every time it recognises a song that is playing. But if your ID tags are off then so are the lyrics. Jet Audio is a little too complex for simply playing audio, too many options, windows, scrolling song titles, blah blah. But it does make number 3 in our list.
Media Monkey - I tried this one out a year or two ago and didn't like it at all, but it seems they have made some major improvements on it since then. I downloaded it the other day and WOW, what a difference! This is an all in one tool that can manage 50,000 or more files, edit and lookup tags, rip, burn cd's, convert, create playlists, export playlists, sync with handhelp players, supports freedb lookups to fix tags on files that are missing information, It's also a great jukebox app that plays songs via it's own player, you choose from genre, artist, year, album and more! It comes with a GOOD equalizer (very important to me), excellent visualizations, auto DJ function which plays random songs from your entire library. There is more, but I think you get the idea, it is now a great application and everyone who loves digital music should check it out!
The PC Jukebox - This is more than just a player, and we do not recommend it for testing your creations fresh out of your studio application. BUT....if you have a boat load of mp3's with CORRECT TAGS, then you will most likely love this software. Nothing cooler at a party than showing off your PC that looks like a jukebox, complete with album covers, ratings, que, now playing, touch screen enabled and a bunch of other cool tricks. Cons about it are: It uses a S#!$ load of cpu and ram when
it runs, it hates REO Speedwagon (I can't get REO to show up in this software to save my life), it's not free and it misreads some tags. But the pro's easily outweigh the cons.
Some of you may be asking "Where is Windows Media Player"? Answer: Not here, I only use it to play wmv video. Don't like the EQ, don't like the heavyness of it, don't like it flipping all over web pages of it's choice, and many other cons.
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