Replacement for WMP 11?

[ncage]

Guys i am so sick of WMP. I love its feature set and its library management system. Sometimes its slugish speed gets on my nerves but its not that big of a deal. What does get on my nerves its the common lock ups. For example for my dvd encoding i use nvidia's cards. Even on a recently built machine if i accidently eject a dvd while its playing. It will lock up. It will also lock up at random doing other things movie related. PowerDVD has no problems. I'm also starting to get it to lock up randomly doing music related stuff.

The bad thing about a WMP lockup is that you can just kill it. It won't DIE!!!!!!!!! You must reboot your PC...a major headach.

So i want a feature rich media player app. Here is what is what i need it to do (try to put in order by importance).
1) Very Good Media Library - this is a an area i really like of wmp. Id like to have, but not necessary, album art. I also rich search capability that is easy to use...again wmp is good at this. I didn't much like winamps media library functions. Id also like it to scan the folders i set up automatically so songs i put in those folders will be picked up automatically.

2) Good Playlist support

3) Wide format support

3) Maybe burn cds occasionally.

4) Id like to sync if possible with my mp3 players (two creative players) but if i have to open wmp occassionaly for this then its not that big of deal.

Anyone have one you particularly like?

thanks,
Ncage

 

[MrChad]

MediaMonkey meets your requirements.

 

[mc866]

Foobar2000 FTW!!

 

[ravana]

Have you tried Winamp lately? I think the free version does support some sort of CD burning.

It will just burn at a slower speed or something like that.

 

[RedsevN]

Winamp seems to fit the bill, but I prefer foobar2000 for simple music playing.

 

[Check]

another vote for Foobar2000.

 

[Zerohm]

I thought Fubar was the answer to my prayers as a low footprint mp3 player but I started noticing choppy frame rates when gaming with Fubar in the background. This choppiness does not occur when running itunes or WMP. I only have about 30 gig of music so I'm not sure what the issue was.

I was enjoying itunes with it's flip-through album art feature until I noticed that it will only pull album art if it's available from the itunes store.

Now I'm thinking of trying MediaMonkey. I read that MediaMonkey will imbed album artwork in the mp3's id3 tag, but does anyone know if itunes will recognize that album art?

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: Zerohm
I read that MediaMonkey will imbed album artwork in the mp3's id3 tag, but does anyone know if itunes will recognize that album art?

Yes, it will read artwork embedded in the ID3 tag.

 

[konakona]

Originally posted by: Zerohm
I thought Fubar was the answer to my prayers as a low footprint mp3 player but I started noticing choppy frame rates when gaming with Fubar in the background. This choppiness does not occur when running itunes or WMP. I only have about 30 gig of music so I'm not sure what the issue was.

I was enjoying itunes with it's flip-through album art feature until I noticed that it will only pull album art if it's available from the itunes store.

Now I'm thinking of trying MediaMonkey. I read that MediaMonkey will imbed album artwork in the mp3's id3 tag, but does anyone know if itunes will recognize that album art?

perhaps you have resampling plugin enabled? or some other plugin that eats up cpu cycles I would guess. something just doesnt add up if you ask me.

as for OPs question, I was going to say fb2k + KMP as my usual recommendtion just by looking at the title. If you think 4) matters than perhaps winamp might work better. Then again, you said you dont mind going back to wmp for occasional syncs. I too, happened to use creative zen as my DAP of choice, and fb2k does everything else very well. 0.9.5.x comes with presets for UI that work quite ok without any tweaking. Looks wise though, I prefer panelUI's customizability. If you spend some time looking for a base set that suits your tastes and modify it even more to your liking, the thing can look real sweet. not for a lazy souls that want click-and-go though.

 

[Evander]

I think J. River Media Jukebox meets most of your requirements (I like it b/c the library has a "folder view / media library hybrid" option) as an audio player. If you want somethink like Windows Media Center, Media Portal is a good bet (both of these programs are free)