Best Music Playback Software EVER!!!

[keloooe]

Ok so all of you have your opinions on what music player is your favourite, and here is mine.
We all know of the standalone software that Microsoft bundles with Windows and we all know of the horrid that iTunes is, but many of you probably don't know of something called foobar2000. Foobar is the best music player out there, mainly for one reason: Customisability.

When you install foobar (it's also only a mere 3MB when installed), you start off with something that does not look too flash hot. But if you do some searching on the Interwebz, you will find a plethora of "components" (or addons in Layman's terms) that can do so much to make your music experience as awesome as possible. Things like an iTunes-esque layout (I use it and love it), popups that display what song is being played (again, love it too!), lyrics, automatic taggers, ratings, autoscrobblers (for all you Last.fm users!) and many skins that alter the appearance, if you can think of it, it's most likely around somewhere!

Then we get to the built-in stuff. Foobar can be configured to look at any folder on your system to update the internal music library. If any music is added or removed to / from your music folder, foobar automatically detects the change and updates the list to display, so adding more music is a LOT easier! Add in keyboard shortcuts that are fully programmable (there are a LOT of options here, I doubt anyone would need ALL of them!), gapless playback, full ASIO support (for all you audiophile out there), ability to rip audio CD's in pretty much ANY audio format... The list continues for ages!

Above is a poll for what you lot use to playback music, will be interesting to see what you use!

[Fretworn]

[wokkaboy]

haha Fretty prefers vinyl to digital format

[keloooe]

Actually, there is an old record player in the new house Fretty, I might actually have a use for my vinyl's now!

[dave.king1]

Nothing like the old vinyl grinder for great playback but not the best for learning songs.

My vote for was for VLC for its ability to both speed and pitch change in playback, try learning a James Burton solo by ear Hello Mary Lou is a classic but quite a challenge even for the technically skilful today. Double stops with bend sin them can really do your head in.

Albert Lee's single string stuff is a snack by comparison ( but still frightening and he turned 70 in December last year and still delivers every time )

[stan]

another vote for VLC..

Might have to check out foobar though

[keloooe]

Stan, if you get foobar, get the Columns UI component, makes it look so much better!!!

[Fretworn]

haha Fretty prefers vinyl to digital format

Actually I was joking (kind of). I'm just too much of a luddite to even know what most of those things on the list are. I've used WMP and iTunes for playback and Audacity for ripping tracks from vinyl. MP3 is a pretty ordinary format data wise so who cares what software you use. I personally think the hardware (speakers/headphones) are often more important anyway.

(I do miss albums, and big album covers that you could actually read though. And the time/volume limitations of LPs meant artists had to be cleverer and think more about song order and how the whole album would be put together.)

[keloooe]

I use FLAC as my personal favourite format when ripping albums off a disk, keeps the high quality but lowers the file size. Bad thing is my waveform plugin can't read it!!!

[keloooe]

Here's my setup, I use only 3 plugins, the Columns UI (gets that iTunes feel to it), PrettyPopup (The little popup on the bottom right) and also Waveform Seekbar (down the bottom). I used Foobar's Preferences page to get the colours and font.