Whether you call them media players, jukeboxes, mp3 apps, music managers or whatever, we all need a proggy to listen to our digital music. For the sake of this article, I am only going to talk about the players that you can get for free and I am not going to go into p2p apps.
So with that, let’s dive deeper. For my money, there are only 3 options: Winamp, iTunes or Windows Media Players, but I will also talk a little about RealPlayer 10. All these applications share basic functions: playing various media files, cataloging digital media, etc. We will focus on the things about them that are different.
In the past, we had Winamp and it was good. Unfortunately, the original Nullsoft team has moved on, and instead of the hacker reputation Winamp used to have when Justin Frankel and everyone were at work, it’s now just another corporate media player with a hazy future.
Winamp lost a lot of the momentum it had when it released a (very) bad Winamp3, but with the release of Winamp5 they seem to be back on track: it’s usable, responsive, and has a lot of plugins and skins built for it. .
The main problem is that, for all its features, it’s not much better than the two dominant media players that are tied to the successful iTunes and WMP music stores. Also, you need to pay $14.95 to get the pro version which adds features that iTunes and WMP include for free. One of the advantages of using Winamp is the possibility of tuning into all the best shoutcast radio stations.
iTunes is, of course, the front end of the digital jukebox for the iPod and Apple Computer’s iTunes music store. The iTunes music store was the first to properly pay for digital music downloads and still has the largest legal downloadable catalog on the web, giving the iTunes jukebox a huge advantage.
If you’re using a Mac, then no need to think twice: you should be using iTunes as your media player, but even if you’re using Windows, iTunes offers an attractive alternative. The iTunes Store is superior (IMHO) to Windows Media-based stores like Napster, and with Apple’s legendary ease of use in full effect, iTunes is an excellent Windows-based Jukebox. It is worth mentioning the Apple Lossless codec that allows us to extract CDs to the ACC format that sound as good as the CD itself to our ears. On the downside, the iTunes jukebox feels heavy on moderately powered PCs compared to Winamp or WMP. It runs a bit slower, seems to use more resources, etc.
Lastly (of course, except for RealPlayer…) Windows Media Player 10 is one of the best pieces of software from Microsoft and is much better than the last generation of MS media players. The jukebox itself is packed with features like its ability to monitor changes to your digital media files and update itself, simple syncing and recording, sorting, and the auto-tagging features are all very nice.
One of the changes in V.10 is the ability to extract files in the format and with (or without) the DRM of your choice. You also have the ability to listen to streaming internet radio with WMP, and although they tend to be more corporate than trendy radio, you can still find great music. WMP also features lossless CD ripping, but I was less impressed with the results than Apples Lossless.
And finally there is RealPlayer. The free RealPlayer 10 is better than the previous version, though that’s not saying much IMHO. It still takes control of your file formats by default, tries to force you to log in, runs in the background (calling home?) unless you can find the settings to tell it not to, all the trouble you’ve always had. Dyed. I’m telling you to 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 overly critical of Real’s jukebox, I think there are other alternatives that are less intrusive and have better feature sets.
All in all, I think iTunes or WMP are a solid choice and by far the best media players available. Winamp is fine too, as long as you don’t need to rip music or re-burn it to CD, but it’s worth downloading and installing just to listen to Shoutcast stations from time to time. Personally, I use WMP at work and iTunes at home, so take it for what it’s worth. I think I like WMP a little better, but not enough to take the time to change iTunes settings at home.