What is your favorite PC-based media player and why so?

 
Craig Shipley
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What is your favorite PC-based media player and why so?

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Posted: 17.01.2021 - 21:07  ·  #1
After almost 15 years of using iTunes as my default media player due to having a "big" (160Gb, wooh-hoo!) iPod Classic, I have finally put a stake thru the heart of it as I have a 512Gb SD card in my Android phone and Neutron as my media player, so my Apple devices are now collecting dust in a drawer. I have tried Media Monkey, MusicBee and while I like both of them, I think I've settled on JRiver Media Center as my player at least for now. There are some quirky aspects that I have had to get used to, some "why can't you do that?" annoyances (mostly with playlist creation) and I have made some "pilot errors" that have required a bit of work to rectify, but overall it is a pretty good media player. Quick, great home networking, plays everything, very rich feature set, highly customizable and deep tagging options.

I'd like to hear from y'all as to what you use to play your music on your PC and what makes you love it (or hate one that you no longer use; I ditched iTunes as it kept defaulting back to trying to load new music to the folder on the C: drive when I explicitly set it to a folder on a standalone drive used exclusively for music. That and it wouldn't play FLAC files.)
SolarPlexus
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Re: What is your favorite PC-based media player and why so?

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Posted: 17.01.2021 - 23:57  ·  #2
Interesting question.

I am an avid fan of Media Monkey, but I have noticed that it is not regularly developed with new updates and/or versions. It is even worse when looking at the plugin support.

In the past I considered Clementine. It looked very promising but development has stopped since 2016. And it is only available in 32-bit for Windows.

I recently discovered Audacious and it looks very nice but seems to be developed for Linux at first and is only available as a 32-bit Windows download.

I have considered MusicBee but I am just too deep into Media Monkey and it seems to look too similar.
Whenever I find the time to build a subsonic server (with Raspberry Pi) I would reconsider using MusicBee. But this time as a streamer using a plugin and receive the stream on my Sonos equipment. A big plus is that subsonic has lots of solutions on a plethora of systems and browsers.

It might just turn out that there will be new (now unimaginable) solutions by the time I have found plenty of time to develop that subsonic server.

Looking forward to read other responses. One never knows how to find the right one...
Craig Shipley
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Location: Norcross, Georgia USA
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Re: What is your favorite PC-based media player and why so?

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Posted: 18.01.2021 - 00:14  ·  #3
I just recently got an update to MM 4 and it appears that the MM 5 release is not too far off. I don't know if my lifetime subscription will let me get it when it comes out.

I really liked the look and feel of MusicBee as it has some nice display features, like a photo-enhanced bio of the band/artist and is probably the closest to what iTunes could have been if Apple decided to ditch the 1990's spreadsheet look and opened it up to be more format-flexible, but that's Apple for you. I'll probably continue to mess around with MB as it seems to be able to co-exist with JRiver without stepping on each other.

What got me going on JRiver was that I made a real-life friend that has the same musical taste as me and he is an avid fan, so I decided to give it a go and have been happy with it for the most part. (Said friend did perform in a local electronic act many years ago and he gave me copies of his music. I'm trying to convince him to throw it up on BC as it is as good if not better than a lot of what I've downloaded recently.)

Quote by SolarPlexus
Interesting question.

I am an avid fan of Media Monkey, but I have noticed that it is not regularly developed with new updates and/or versions. It is even worse when looking at the plugin support.

In the past I considered Clementine. It looked very promising but development has stopped since 2016. And it is only available in 32-bit for Windows.

I recently discovered Audacious and it looks very nice but seems to be developed for Linux at first and is only available as a 32-bit Windows download.

I have considered MusicBee but I am just too deep into Media Monkey and it seems to look too similar.
Whenever I find the time to build a subsonic server (with Raspberry Pi) I would reconsider using MusicBee. But this time as a streamer using a plugin and receive the stream on my Sonos equipment. A big plus is that subsonic has lots of solutions on a plethora of systems and browsers.

It might just turn out that there will be new (now unimaginable) solutions by the time I have found plenty of time to develop that subsonic server.

Looking forward to read other responses. One never knows how to find the right one...
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