I have been giving this some thought recently, and thought that I would toss this into the community for input. I have mentioned before that I use a big playlist in my shop, several hundred songs and videos on eternal shuffle. I used to use Winamp, but that sort of went away. Right now, I am using Foobar2000, but it has drawbacks. It has a boring interface, and is limited in the formats it will play. What do is keep the playlist on a pc in the office, and use the monitors in other spaces like a second monitor, showing the video if available. Since switching to foobar2000, I don’t get to do the video part. does anyone know of a better player?
Also, what would be nice is the ability to play preferred or newer songs slightly more often than the rest of them. I was thinking about this today. I put a couple of new albums on the playlist this morning, and none of the songs got played today. Either the newer ones could play more often, or the user could assign some numerical value to favorite songs.
The other thing I was thinking about is that it would be nice to have the extra monitors revert to the security cameras if a motion sensor was tripped. that is why those monitors were installed. I can probably figure out how to do that, if I give it enough thought.
thanks in advance for taking time to read or respond to what is probably a frivolous request.
Re: Winamp, I’ve yet to find another multimedia player with the same mix of minimal and extensible. So many other programs are bloated or kludgy or both. For music, I exclusively use the latest build of Winamp 2.x on oldversion.com. Still perfect for any x86 windows system, only needs a tablet mode (don’t spend a ton of time on tablets/in tablet mode).
I still use windows media player for my mp3s. Honestly I like the UI for that one everything else tries to look like iTunes which I really never liked the UI on.
What’s wrong with foobar2k? It should support any format you throw at it with the right plugins, and has a ton of UI customization. I grudgingly use iTunes since I’m locked into Apple Land, but if I had a choice that’s what I’d use.
I am using Foobar2K now, but it does not play video, or have some of the other customizations I was used to with winamp. I would still be using winamp, but it kept conflicting with other software I need to use and crashing.
Musicbee is also pretty good. Advantage it has is it can be used with ninite for unattended install. Then again Winamp and FooBar are theretoo so eh. I like it because it has nice functionality and a skinnable interface, which is nice since i prefer dark interfaces.
That looks nice. I’ll have to check that out. If only there was something that worked with my DRM Apple stuff and Apple Music subscription I’d ditch iTunes in a heartbeat.
MusicBee is my personal favorite for music, and has a variety of options, and you can set up smart playlists based on playcount or date added or other factors. I don’t use it for video, so I can’t say it’s functionality there, though.
There was, some years back (back when Android was on Froyo). It wasn’t a bad player, with the exception of all the times it froze my phone so it needed a hard reset.
Yeah thanks, but I’m not nearly as fussed about the look of a player as much as its functionality.
When you tell winamp to shuffle, it randomises the list and goes through it sequentially, which is preferable to just picking a track at random, where you might hear the same track again in an hour.
The best I’ve managed with VLC is to sort tracks by length, which makes it random enough.
agreed. I like not having to listen to excessive replays. I also don’t like when playing in the same order repeatedly. I start to associate the end of one song with the start of the other. it is hard to describe why that is annoying, but it is.
Maybe because that’s only something that’s meant to happen with albums or compilations.
…Is there a player where you can give tracks star ratings to determine how often they come up in a random playlist or how high up the list they are in a shuffled playlist?
