Media Player Shootout
Whether you call them media players, jukeboxes, mp3 apps, music
managers, or whatever - we all need a proggy to listen to our
digital music with sowe decided that it was time to publish the
Online Music Blog
Media Player Shootout. For the sake
of this article I am only going to discuss players you can get
for free and I am not going to go into p2p apps.
So with that, lets dive right in. For my money there are are
only 3 choices - Winamp, iTunes, or Windows Media Players - but
I'll talk a little about RealPlayer 10 as well. All of these
applications share baseline features - playing various media
files, cataloging digital media, etc. We'll focus on things
about them that are different.
Back in the day, we had Winamp,
and it was good. Unfortunately the original Nullsoft
team has all moved on and instead of the hacker cred that
Winamp used to have back when Justin Frankel et all were on the
job it is now just another corporate media player with a hazy
future.
Winamp lost a lot of momentum that it had when it released a (
very ) bad Winamp3 - but with the release of Winamp5 they seem
to be back on track - it is useable, responsive, and has a lot
of plugins and skins created for it.
The major problem is that for all of it's features it is not
much, if any, better then the two dominant media players that
are tied to successful music stores iTunes and WMP. Additionally
you have to pay $14.95 to get the pro version that add features
that iTunes and WMP include for free. One of the bonuses of
using Winamp is the ability to tune into all of the cool shoutcast radio
stations.
iTunes is, of course, is the digital jukebox front end for the
iPod and the iTunes
music store from apple computer. The iTunes music store was the
first to get pay for digital music downloads right and it still
has the largest legal downloadable catalog on the net giving the
iTunes jukebox a hefty advantage.
If you are using a Mac then it is a no brainer - you should be
using iTunes as you media player, but even if you are using
Windows iTunes provides an attractive alternative. The iTunes
store is superior ( imho ) to the Windows Media based stores
such as Napster and with the legendary Apple ease of use in full
effect iTunes makes a great Windows based Jukebox. Noteworthy is
the Apple Lossless codec that allows one to rip CD's to the ACC
format that sound as good as the CD itself to our ears. On the
negative side, the iTunes jukebox feels heavy on moderately
powered PC's compared to Winamp or WMP. It runs a little slower,
seems to use more resources, etc.
Last (of yea, except for RealPlayer... ) Windows Media Player
10 is one of Microsoft's best pieces of software and is some
much better then the last generation of MS media players. The
jukebox itself is stuffed with features such as its ability to
monitor changes to your digital media files and update itself,
simple sync and burn, ratings, and the auto tag features are all
very nice.
One of the changes in V.10 is the ability to rip files if the
format and with ( or without ) the DRM of your choice. You also
get the ability to listen to Internet radio streams with WMP,
and although they tend to be more corporate then the hip
shoutcast radio you can still find some good music. WMP also
features a lossless ripping of CD's but I was less impressed
with the results then I was with Apples Lossless.
And finally there is RealPlayer. The
free RealPlayer 10 is better then previous version although that
is not saying much imho. It still takes over your file formats
by default, tries to force you register, runs in the background
(phoning home ?) unless you can find the settings to tell it not
to - all of the problems that it has always have. I say stay as
far away from Real as possible even if you can use "Harmony" to
use your iPod with the Real store. While I may be being over
critical of Real's jukebox - I do think that there are other
alternatives that are less intrusive and have better feature
sets.
All in all I think that either iTunes or WMP is a solid choice
and far and away the best media players available. Winamp is a
okay too as long as you don't need to rip music or burn it back
to a CD - but it is worth the download and install just to
listen to Shoutcast stations from time to time. Personally I use
WMP at work and iTunes are home, so take that for what it's
worth. I think that I like WMP a little better, but not so much
that I would take the time to switch my iTunes set up at home.