Software Recommendations

anaemic · Mar 2, 2011

It is the year 2011 and it occurs to me that ive got into a bit of a rut of using old old applications for most things I do.

What I'm really bored of recently is winamp, im still running 2.80 which came out a whopping 9 years ago, and its crummy support for flac / mp4 is getting me down.
What music playing software do you guys use? I'm not looking for hundreds of bloatwarey features, the best programs are tiny, simple, but functional as far as I'm concerned.

Also VLC is beginning to get me down, every new version I install runs a bit slower and slower than the last, and gets more irritating and laggy and unresponsive.
Any alternatives out there worth trying?

Also firefox plugins? Has there ever been an update to the spell-check software or third party alternatives? it seems like there should really be something which at least auto-replaces common errors and allows you to manually alter its dictionary by now.

Any other cool apps you've found that you'd recommend?
I'm in the market for a cool desktop calendar / personal organiser.

Balton · Mar 2, 2011

anaemic said:
It is the year 2011 and it occurs to me that ive got into a bit of a rut of using old old applications for most things I do.

What I'm really bored of recently is winamp, im still running 2.80 which came out a whopping 9 years ago, and its crummy support for flac / mp4 is getting me down.
What music playing software do you guys use? I'm not looking for hundreds of bloatwarey features, the best programs are tiny, simple, but functional as far as I'm concerned.

Also VLC is beginning to get me down, every new version I install runs a bit slower and slower than the last, and gets more irritating and laggy and unresponsive.
Any alternatives out there worth trying?

upgrade your winamp to the latest version and I doubt there's anything better out than VLC. Though I've no slowdowns on VLC or lag.

Raynor.Z · Mar 2, 2011

Personally I use WMP12 for music and VLC for most movies. Both do their job flawlessly.

xMurphyx · Mar 2, 2011

I like Evil Player for music. I use that and winamp, at the moment. I have a couple of shows of talk radio in Evil Player and music in winamp. Having two programs I don't have to deal with playlists too much. If I had to pick just one I would pick Evil Player. It's comfortable and stable and you can practically turn off anything until it's just a window with your songs in it. I like to keep the bar where you can skip around but even that can be turned off. Play/Pause = Space, Volume is +/- (in case you don't just have volume buttons on your keyboard anyway). What more do you need, right? Give it a try.
I don't like how winamp has to look different than the rest of the OS. It's a good program though.

For videos I use VLC exclusively. Or I watch them on my xbox360. If you really need an alternative I liked GOM quite a bit a while back. It requires codecs as usual so it doesn't just play everything out of the box like VLC does but it's very comfortable to use.

I recommend the Linkification plug-in for Firefox, which turns every typed-out url into a clickable link. Adblock is a must too, of course.
Too bad I can't use Firefox anymore because it bluescreens on me. I'm stuck with Opera now. It's alright, but it's no Firefox...

Al · Mar 2, 2011

foobar

TurdDrive · Mar 2, 2011

*Fubar*

Al · Mar 2, 2011

No. foobar

haarg · Mar 2, 2011

foobar2000 used to have a terrible UI, but that's all been pretty much fixed. It will support every format you ever care about, and all it tries to do is play music.

Media Player Classic Home Cinema is a good alternative to VLC, although you will need codecs as well. ffdshow will take care of most of that, or you could use a codec pack like CCCP.

Capt.Toilet · Mar 2, 2011

VLC all the way. Never had any lockups of any kind. You think upgrading to the newer versions might have corrupted a file or two? I would run a repair on it if possible just to rule that out.

shoptroll · Mar 2, 2011

anaemic said:
What I'm really bored of recently is winamp, im still running 2.80 which came out a whopping 9 years ago, and its crummy support for flac / mp4 is getting me down.

Winamp 5 is what I'm using. Just strip out all the extra cruft during the install if you're not going to use it for everything.

I've heard good stuff about foobar but I've never used it.

I'm in the market for a cool desktop calendar / personal organiser.

I like Thunderbird with the Lightning extension added.

IronMonkey · Mar 2, 2011

http://www.atunes.org/ said:
What is aTunes?

aTunes is a full-featured audio player and manager, developed in Java programming language, so it can be executed on different platforms: Windows, Linux and Unix-like systems, ...
Currently plays mp3, ogg, wma, wav, flac, mp4 and radio streaming, allowing users to easily edit tags, organize music and rip Audio CDs.

This is what I moved onto after I gave up on Winamp. Mainly, because it didn't keel over trying to manage 25000+ tracks. Nice interface, tons of functions and stable. My daughter also uses it on her W7 box and is very happy with it.

On Linux, Amarok without a doubt. Also (although a bit beta-ish) available on Windows but there is really no reason to use Amarok on Windows when atunes is available (just as there is no reason to use atunes on Linux as Amarok is available.)

Kyllian · Mar 2, 2011

anaemic said:
What I'm really bored of recently is winamp, im still running 2.80 which came out a whopping 9 years ago, and its crummy support for flac / mp4 is getting me down.

Dunno about MP4, but winamp5 runs FLAC just fine

Also firefox plugins?

GMail Checker if you have multiple gmail accounts
Download Statusbar
AdBlockPlus
IETab2

Haarg said:
Media Player Classic Home Cinema is a good alternative to VLC, although you will need codecs as well. ffdshow will take care of most of that, or you could use a codec pack like CCCP.

Yar, the K-Lite Codec Pack has it as well

anaemic · Mar 2, 2011

Right, I'm giving VLC a clean wipe and reinstall in the hope that'll help me out, and I've ditched Winamp for Foobar for a test period.
Last time i remember foobar it was an install then download and install a gui kinda program, it seems to have come a long way.

Ive definitely already for addblock plus, as well as https-everywhere and beef taco's targeted advertising opt out and would recommend those to everyone.

Still lacking some sort of organiser I guess, but pretty good work all round guise!

DarkEmperor · Mar 2, 2011

anaemic said:
It is the year 2011 and it occurs to me that ive got into a bit of a rut of using old old applications for most things I do.

What I'm really bored of recently is winamp, im still running 2.80 which came out a whopping 9 years ago, and its crummy support for flac / mp4 is getting me down.

foobar looks like software from the '80s or some half-assed one for Linux...

AIMP2 is the Winamp you were dreaming of. Try it and never look back...

Balton · Mar 2, 2011

Can anyone recommend me a free program that lets me convert m4a to mp3 without me having to install apple software?

TurdDrive · Mar 2, 2011

Al said:
No. foobar

Ah, thought you meant,

****ed up beyond any recognition

anaemic · Mar 2, 2011

looking pretty chill

Now if only I could replace that sticky-note with something small and calendary

NRG · Mar 2, 2011

Winamp for all audio. Plays 99% of the formats and codecs I throw at it. (Some stuff isn't enabled by default, like 24 bit audio) When it doesn't support something, (DTS 5.1, Monkey audio, etc) I use VLC.

For videos, I use MPC - Home Cinema. VLC is nice for being user friendly, huge format support and lightweight but nothing beats the preferences you get with MPC. I love some of the features like GPU acceleration. Most of the stuff it can do VLC can do too, but MPC does it better.

haarg · Mar 2, 2011

DarkEmperor said:
foobar looks like software from the '80s or some half-assed one for Linux...

It looks like the rest of your operating system. What's so special about a music player that it needs to look like a physical stereo system and have custom skins?

KaL976 · Mar 2, 2011

WMP & VLC.

I don't care what they look like although I do like the way WMP does mini-mode in the taskbar.

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