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Originally Posted by Augi
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 about 50MB. Given it is a swim-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 play 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.
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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.
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That MusikCube sounds interesting. My only media player for quite some time has been Foobar2k (have used to at least some degree since pre .4.0 I think) . Many, many moons back I used winamp and other options but need support for ogg-vorbis/wavpack/ape/mpc/flac/whatever else is in my collection and the 'out of the box' support along with the sleek clean look is very nice in my opinion.
Have read about cue sheets on Hydrogen Audio for years but never have played with those. I finally have some actual hard drive space now and will be expanding my digital collection though
My favourite open-source programs are the GIMP (running 2.4.4, might go 2.4.5 one day), and OpenOffice.org. The only thing keeping MS word 2000 on my systems is the poor pre-word 97 table creation in OO.
Firefox sees a lot of use from me as well, that shares duty with Opera as they both have their own 'must have' features that complement each other nicely depending on what I am doing. This forum gets nothing but the best though - Opera. But that is strictly my opinion and such comparisons belong in another thread obviously. Which gets me thinking about posting my thoughts on my own website for those people probably not interested in them.....
edit:fixed spelling