I’ll admit that iTunes is my music player of choice. It easily plays my music, it allows me to burn discs easily, it has excellent library capabilities, and it allows me to easily play music from shared libraries. Until recently I was 100% happy with iTunes. Then I noticed my system beginning to feel sluggish anytime iTunes was open. It seemed that iTunes was sucking the life out of my system. So I decided to give a few alternate media players a try. I only cared about the capabilities I actually use, so I don’t care about video playback or advanced visualizations. Here were my findings.

Winamp 5 | http://www.winamp.com

Winamp, the old standby. I remember the day I first used Winamp 2, I thought it was the coolest program ever created, but when I switched to Mac in 2001 I lost all contact with it until now. Coming back to Winamp after using iTunes for so long was a little awkward. The first thing was the play between Playlist and Library. While in iTunes your Library is where you play almost all your music from and playlists are more for burning (at least for me), but in Winamp thePlaylist becomes your primary means of selecting songs and the Library is all but lost in the background. I did like Winamp’s smaller memory needs, but I never felt that Winamp was doing everything I wanted. It always seemed that Winamp was nothing more than a stripped version of a more full featured player.

XMMS | http://www.xmms.org
During my Linux days XMMS was a standout. A full featured program that was easy to use and got the job done. While the program took its cues from Winamp (it even supports Winamp skins), it’s still 100% original under the hood.

I always felt like I was using something original with XMMS. But, of course, the same problem arose between the playlist and library, but with XMMS I never found the library. I was left with only one playlist to use, unless I wanted to save playlists to load later.

So while I did like the feeling of using a program “outside of the box”, I didn’t like the feeling of taking a lot of time to find my music. It seemed that the only real way to play music for to import all your music into one playlist and sort them. Then when you wanted to play a song you had to scroll through the entire list and find the song you wanted. Very time consuming when you are scrolling through 10,000 songs.

Foobar | http://www.foobar2000.org
Foobar took the feeling I got using XMMS and blew it out of the park. It allows you to customize to your wits end.

But for me the Dark theme I found on some website was just fine.

The biggest downfall of Foobar turned out to be the endless customization allowed in the program. Because you can control what features are present and which are left out I often times found myself clicking on buttons in the layout that did nothing because I didn’t have the proper plugin installed. I was never prompted with a window telling me what I was missing, so I simply had buttons to nothing in the layout.

Additionally, I’m a fan of albums, so I like to see album artwork, something I thought would be easy to add in Foobar since there was a link to get the missing artwork in the window, but no. It was another dead link to nothing.

After using Foobar for about a week it was quietly uninstalled with little fanfare. But as the program matures and gains more supporters I think there may be a second shot with me. Once the program becomes less for people who are use to Linux and more for your typical music listener than I’m sure I’ll check it out again.

Songbird | http://www.songbirdnest.com
I went into using Songbird with high hopes. The interface resembled iTunes and the features of the program were amazing. Built on Firefox, in program music blog parsing, online music libraries, it seemed everything was going to be great, but then a problem same out of left field and killed Songbird for me. I’m a rabid user of Last.fm and need to have my music “scrobbled” to the service, but Songbird did nothing but submit errors to Last.fm and refused to work properly with the service. My attempts to gain any helpful knowledge in their help forums were met with silence. There may be better days in the future for Songbird, after all it’s still early in its development. So I would assume that before 1.0 the kinks will be ironed out and it may win me over.

So that’s it. Those are the best I’ve seen so far. If you know of others I should try give me the link and I’ll see how it is. So now, back to my music…..playing in iTunes.