Saturday, November 30, 2013

Winamp (or iTunes) Got You Down? Here Are Some Awesome Alternatives!

So if you're an avid Winamp user (or you're just fed up with iTunes), and the recent announcement of Winamp coming to a close has you looking for another media player, you'd be surprised on some other very good options out there.


MediaMonkey:

If you were to ask one of my friends, he would go on about how MediaMonkey is the best thing ever. Although that may be influenced with the fact that the icon has a picture of a monkey on it. Anyway, this media player supports playing MP3, AAC, OGG, WMA, FLAC, MPC, APE, and WAV files. It also can adjust volume levels automatically using ReplayGain and MP3Gain. The easiest part about transitioning from Winamp to MediaMonkey is that you can directly your ratings, playback information from Winamp, straight into MediaMonkey, so you don't lose any of your data. And, if you're lazy and don't want to keep adding music into your media player, no problem, MediaMonkey automatically monitor's the user's hard drive to ensure that any changes are automatically updated in the library. And if you're part of the population that's just sick of iTunes, you can even sync your iPod, iPhone and Android device with MediaMonkey instead of having to use dreaded iTunes (if you don't know why iTunes is bad, just Google it, there are many articles that explain why it's bad). There are many third party add-ons that support MediaMonkey, so there are many other features that MediaMonkey can support, you just need to dig a bit to find them and learn how to install them.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/



MusicBee:

This is a less-known solution but very-light weight and simplistic.  MusicBee supports MP3, AAC, M4A, MPC, OGG, FLAC, APE, Opus, TAK, WV, WMA and WAV. Something that MusicBee does which is pretty awesome, is the ability to encode your music to and from all supported formats. So if you don't want to overload your iPod or MP3 with FLAC files, you can easily convert them to MP3 files or whatever file you desire. MusicBee also supports ReplayGain and file organization. Some may find this odd, but it also features web browsing. Yeah that's right, web browsing, right from the media player. Additionally, there are skins that can change the look of the player, and some winamp visualizers that can also be installed.

http://getmusicbee.com/



foobar2000:

Foobar2000 can either be the best experience with any music player ever, or the worst experience, depending on how patient you are with it. Foobar is a completely customizable music platform, and is also my personal choice for music playback. Foobar supports MP1, MP2, MP3, MPC, AAC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC/Ogg FLAC, ALAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CD, Speex, and Opus. Now that's a lot of files. The great thing about foobar, is that no two people will have the same layout, unless they of course copy each other. On the foobar website, people can download plugins which they can easily install and display on their interface. For example, if you want a lyrics scrolling down with the song you're listening to, you can download that plugin and have it on the interface. There are tutorials on how to get started with foobar and I highly recommend using this program (along with any of the programs suggested here). 

http://www.foobar2000.org/



If you're on OS X, then here are some options for you as well. I have no experience with any of these programs, but I'm sure they all will be better than iTunes.

http://mashable.com/2013/07/31/alternatives-to-itunes/#_



So get out there, and enjoy music they way it is meant to be enjoyed!

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