Shadow Wolf Posted November 24, 2007 Share Posted November 24, 2007 OK guys, I'm finally doing it. I've been using iTunes for 3 years. It's awesome, and close to perfect, but I'm tired of trying to wrangle smart playlists to do what I want. So I switched to Winamp a month ago. Winamp has its faults, but it also does some things I like. But the point is, in 7 years, I have never found an audio player that does everything I want. So I'm gonna see if you guys know of anything. Here's the crucial things I want it to do. 1. The option to organize your media library using the folder structure of the audio on your hard disc. I have all 4000 something songs meticulously organized and categorized in folders already. Why should I have to do it again in whatever media program I'm using. The other thing is, I have certain soundtracks that are MASSIVE rips from games, organized in fairly deep folder structures, and they need to stay that way to make sense. For example, I have a World of Warcraft soundtrack rip. The files themselves are not very well labeled, but the theme for Darnassus is in "WoW Rip>Old World>Cities>Darnassus>Darn01.mp3." It would just be a hell of a lot easier to maintain folder structure and make that easy to find than trying to manipulate ID3 tags and smart playlists. 2. Watch my media folders and automatically add new files I put in there. Winamp does this, which puts it a step above iTunes. I don't wanna have to go find files in that sea of audio and add them to my library. I wanna drop the file in a folder, and next time I open my media player, it's there. Do that shit for me. 3. Ability to set a DEFAULT for each playlist as to what columns will be shown and in what order. I don't wanna have to set up every damn one separately. It's silly. 4. A respect for the awesome and mind boggling organizational power of an ID3 tag. iTunes has this in spades. Problem with iTunes is you can tag every field in the file, but no matter how hard you try, you can't use the browser to filter files by anything but genre>artist>album. They're shooting themselves in the foot there. I REALLY do not think this is too much to ask from an audio player. Evidently it is though. There's a few plugins for Winamp that will get me really close to this, but they're extremely outdated. Also, keep in mind, I could not give a shit if this player plays videos, makes cookies, or feeds starving chinese children. I want an audio player and media library, and I want a good one. So there it is. This ultimate media player does not necessarily have to be free either. I want to know if it exists. Please tell me it does. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MasterSenshi Posted November 24, 2007 Share Posted November 24, 2007 Yeah I agree. That ISN"T unrealistic, however, maybe expecting developers to listen to the users is nowadays.. I've used Windows Media, Real, Winamp, Itunes and probably a dozen other programs. I liked Winamp when I was back on XP, but I didn't like having to download everything and install plugins to get some of the functionality I had in Real and Windows at the time. I use Itunes now, and it's great, except for a few things. The 'shared' folders have a tendency to crash if you're on a big network (like at my university). There's also significant down time and buffering even though you can be on a very stable connection. I'm a visual person, and the fact that the 'album art' can be removed or added depending on the whim of apple's servers is really annoy. If I have a album label A, and they give me some generic art when I have the special edition, it pisses me off. Or if they don't have it at all when I have an obscure track, that nonetheless is out there SOMEWHERE also annoys me. Either support nearly all the art, or make it easy to manually add the art. I should be able to put any image there, if what they have doesn't suffice. ITunes also has some good and some bad presets for folders, but I have yet to ascertain if you can make specialized folders, for example 'all rock' 'all soundtracks' 'all artists with the letter 'a' in the title', etc. Other than those little quips I like the sorting features of Itunes, although I'd like a bit more customization, most of those things I can do from the media viewer in OSX. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Culturekoi Posted November 25, 2007 Share Posted November 25, 2007 This is relevat to my interests. I'd been using winamp, but now it seems irreparably broken, even after multiple reinstalls, so I'd like to see what y'all recommend, even for basic, basic functionality (that isn't windows media player) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OverCoat Posted November 25, 2007 Share Posted November 25, 2007 Okay Give xmplay a shot. You can play pretty much anything winamp plays, plus xmplay was designed for accurate mod playback [mod/s3m/it/xm files] so really it plays files better. The library is much better than Winamp's, it keeps tabs on your specific music directories, and you can sort playlists by filename and path. The only downside is you can't edit ID3 information with it, though you can tag any file within the library so you can tell what it is yourself [e.g. if you tagged it inside xmplay, nothing else but your personal xmplay can read the tags, it doesn't edit the files]. Also I recommend you look for some custom skins for it. Though I'm sure you don't watch movies inside winamp, you should be using VLC Media Player or Media Player Classic. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shadow Wolf Posted November 25, 2007 Author Share Posted November 25, 2007 No, I have video players nailed. GOMPlayer is far and away the absolute pinnacle of video players as far as I'm concerned. I have never encountered a file it won't play. It opens FLV, raw AVI, even VOB and AC3 files right off a dvd, and if it ever DOES encounter a file it can't play, it will automatically take you to a page where you can download a codec for it. It has a mind boggling amount of options, and best of all, it's absolutely free. If you want a VIDEO player, GOMPlayer is the way to go. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
irriadin Posted November 25, 2007 Share Posted November 25, 2007 vlc player ftw. as for music, I use winamp, but I've heard foobar2000 is very good. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phill Posted November 25, 2007 Share Posted November 25, 2007 First off, I am going to assume you are on windows, this forum has never seemed huge on Linux or OSX....or at least most of the questions posted are for windows. Second, you may not like this, but WMP11 does every you asked for in your post. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shadow Wolf Posted November 25, 2007 Author Share Posted November 25, 2007 Second, you may not like this, but WMP11 does every you asked for in your post. Then do show me how the hell to do it please. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OverCoat Posted November 25, 2007 Share Posted November 25, 2007 Too bad WMP can't actually load any kind of formats or I'd actually like it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Katsurugi Posted November 25, 2007 Share Posted November 25, 2007 Too bad WMP can't actually load any kind of formats or I'd actually like it. Agreed. I like the interface for WMP very much. I still use it for my default for some activities, like listening to audio CDs specifically. However, for it's much more practical to load up specialized players for audio and video. For video, I'd suggest zoomplayer. For audio, Winamp is the progam I've settled with. It's just that with Winamp, you should just organize your mp3s and such in a logical way so you can find things fairly quickly. Other than filenames, you need good ID3 tags (tag&rename should help tons). And that's about it. I find that I just don't like iTunes. It works, but being that it's an application that is very widely used, you'd think it would smooth out its bugs quicker after loads consumer complaints. There are some aesthetic conflicts I have with it, but other than that... the option to make your player compact is a must. WMP is good. Use it first if you have no need outside of .avi and .mp3. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phill Posted November 25, 2007 Share Posted November 25, 2007 Then do show me how the hell to do it please. The first thing you wanted was to view the folder structured. As you can see, once you select "Show More Views" you get the option to view the folder structure. Next you wanted the media player to watch your folders, this isn't an instant thing in WMP11 but you don't want it to be. The constant reading of your drive will shorten its life span and increase the risk of drive failure...just look at the pics and know that new media will be added to your library if it is in one of those folders After that you wanted to customize columns for play lists, just go into a play list, right click on the column header and click 'Choose Columns' not that hard. For the last one....I am starting to think that the booze was getting to me last night. I could have sworn that you could make your own views...but now I can't seem to find an option for that....right now the only thing I can think of is going into the Songs view and sorting all music based on a column of your choice...I am going to have to find out what I was doing last night... oh and as for WMP not playing certain audio files....why not take the 5 fucking seconds and download the required codecs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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