Hain

I had to help a friend find some low memory alternatives to her favorite programs, and it came down to my favorite of things to do: test media players.

I ran with ones I trust: Foobar2000, MusikCube, MediaMonkey, and Songbird. Winamp is a resource hog, as is WMP and iTunes.

I started of with my favorite: FB2K. After importing all my library, consisting of a variety of my old MP3s, my newly ripped OGG Vorbis, WavPack Hybrid lossless, FLAC images, etc etc, FB2K can play everything I throw at it (well Monkey's Audio APE requires you to download a plugin, but it is one of the recommended plugins). It foots about 36MB with the default skin and depending on how complex I wanted to make the skin, never went above 50MB. Given it is a swiss-army tool for audio conversion and tagging it is still my favorite Audio Tool. It is only for windows, but works in Wine pretty well.

Songbird is actually really cool. It is a media player and internet browser in one. It is built on top of the same code that makes Firefox, and has a similar sidebar interface as itunes (only black-- hawt!). It requires you to front a lot of memory however, running up 140MB. This is the newly made 0.5 beta and I know it will get better. Now it supports all common formats: MP3, WMA, M4A. It even supports OGG and FLAC. However not WavPack, nor images. Woop-die, how many of you are as crazy as me? I know Shuak knows what a CUE sheet is, though! Native media library and sorting capabilities. Songbird is cross compatible with all operating systems.

Next came Mediamonkey. Crap. Most of the features are only offered in the gold version. You can't even make it search a folder for media. It plays everything though, minus *-images. The gold version looks to have all the same features as FB2k. It sports low footprint, ~26MB. I don't like it any more.

MusikCube blew my mind! Native library and folder watch, standard as well as non-standard formats are playable (except for images, which is a big deal for me as all my lossless archives are images) and sports the smallest footprint- 9MB! It is excellent for what it is designed for.

For any normal use I recommend MusikCube. For advanced use, go with FooBar2000. For pretty go with Songbird.

I know FB2K and Songbird can be made to work with iPods, no clue on MusikCube.