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[Guan]

Hello mp3 maniacs there are many players out there now and it's hard to choose what to use well in my epinion XMPlay is one of the best so far but there are more than meets the eye  
For exampel Foobar2000 is a well designed mp3 player
http://foobar2000.hydrogenaudio.org
Then there are Coolplayer
http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net
And so on there are so many players out there but i only use 2

XMPlay and Foobar2000

[Fraggie]

And what about ear?

[Guan]

well just talking aboute small great players that sounds accurate there are many mp3 players out there that sounds like rat piss and take up a lot of recources.

What player/players do all of you think are best/good?
Or just plain bad  :evil:

[Irrational86]

Well...for the best/good, i'd choose XMPlay, how about you?

[Guan]

I like XMPlay but i also like Foobar2000 but over all XMPlay wins because of the Dynamic Auto amplification is perfect all my mp3's aren't normalized

[Pike84]

I haven't bumped into many players, that would be actively developed besides Xmplay and Winamp.. haven't much needed to, though, considering Xmplay's current state and progress . I hadn't ever heard of Foobar2000 before, for example.

Are there many around then?

[Keltic Danor]

yah foobar is a XP/2000 only player by the plugin man Peter Pawlowski I believe. (Which ofcourse mean I've never used it )

As to other players... well I searched exhaustively before I found XMPlay 1.6 and even posted something on the sonique boards yonks ago.... goes a little something like this...

click here if the dodgy link works.

Me thinks I got carried away a bit

[Zarggg]

---
xm player is cool.
actualy the player itself is only 145kb.
but when u use it, it takes about 13megs of memory!!!
---

[Ian @ un4seen]

actualy the player itself is only 145kb.
but when u use it, it takes about 13megs of memory!!!

Maybe you have a load of plugins?

[Pike84]

I read the linked thread through and one guy there said, Xmplay loads the entire track into memory, and so if you play a 13 meg track, the memory usage would be at least that. Sounds reasonable... but doesn't seem to be true, because in my case Xmplay always uses a tad over 13 megs for mp3s. For mods the mem usage varies, but seems to be always even more than aforementioned(!).

I'm sure this memory usage stuff has been discussed on this forum at some point, but can't really remember.. And I don't much care for the mem usage at that level, though, cause I have 320 megs total. But maybe Ian could clear this up a bit?

Oh, and I'm on WinXP Pro (SP1)

[Keltic Danor]

I read the linked thread through and one guy there said, Xmplay loads the entire track into memory, and so if you play a 13 meg track, the memory usage would be at least that.

Ah but I think if you read all the way through you'd see that XMPlay no longer does things that way It used to yes, but not anymore.

[Pike84]

Oh, ok.. But Xmplay still takes over 13 megs on my machine with mp3s and more with mods . When I start it, it takes just below 13 megs.

[modified] Uhmm... Now this is kinda weird. The memory usage just dropped to a fraction of what it was, without me doing anything! Whoa, now I'm lost

[Tsorovan]

Maybe you minimized it? Minimizing apps now and then causes Windows to either swap out (to swap file) or just somehow kill some memory usage without it showing anywhere. Recommended to minimize and then maximize some apps now and then.

Startup, 20 song (MP3) playlist loaded:
CPU  Image Name   CPU Time  Mem Usage Peak Mem  VM Size
00   xmplay.exe   0:00:00   6,308 K   6,512 K   4,748 K
00   winamp.exe   0:00:00   7,520 K   7,568 K   6,360 K

Playing for 10 minutes:
CPU  Image Name   CPU Time  Mem Usage Peak Mem  VM Size
02   xmplay.exe   0:00:12   6,732 K   6,740 K   5,144 K
00   winamp.exe   0:00:00   8,452 K   8,792 K   7,040 K

XMPlay 2.5 w/ shnAmp, in_mid.dll, in_mt2.dll plugins.
Winamp 2.80a w/ shnAmp, in_ogg.dll, in_mt2.dll plugins and then those default ones.
No mods loaded in this test, but I've consistently seen higher memory usages with XMPlay. Of course, it sounds a lot better than Winamp's shoddy mod support.

Oh, and this is with WinXP plus ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1 in win.ini for less virtual memory paging and more RAM usage instead. I'm sure I would see less RAM usage and instead a lot more VM usage with it disabled.

[Edit] It seems ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1 might not do anything in XP anymore... but I distinctly remember it having a slight effect in 2K.

[Pike84]

Hmmm.. This seems something quite complicated to me. My mem usage at startup is always around 13 megs but later drops to as low as around 300 kbs, and this is when nothing is playing. When something is playing it can first comsume even 20 megs (with some mods), but later circles around 1-5 megs.

[Antrix]

I've benn using STP (http://www.netean.com/stp/) to play MP3 files before i got XMPlay. It's small, fast, and less on resources, definitely better after XMPlay.

[Tsorovan]

Hmm...the core of Foobar2000 was pretty nice. Good performance and no resource hogging. And those global hotkeys were nice. Too bad the UI sucked immensely though...but when (if?) they've "disintegrated" it and made it customizable, it might be a viable player for poor me.

STP would be the one I would use, were it not for its not-quite-support of VBR files. Screwed up time display/length and hence improper time search makes that impossible for me, sadly.

[Guan]

Quote from the maker of Foobar2000
"foobar2000 is about functionality, technical capabilities and high-quality audio playback, NOT about cool-looking user interface. if you want skinning, visualisation, etc, then fb2k is not for you"

[Pike84]

Oh, I somehow managed to ignore that minimizing thing you mentioned, Tsorovan . Well anyway, yes I obviously minimized it before, because when I now tested it, minimizing Xmplay did instantly make it use about 12 megs less memory

[Tsorovan]

Guan: hehe, ok...I don't blame you. "Functionality" IMO means a good UI. It had none. I don't want "cool-looking" apps either, I just want them to be practical (and small) :)

[Guan]

Tsorovan
Well the maker of Foobar2000 is not ready whith the program yet, but when he is done it will be a player that has Functionality whithout the skins.
The player is updated almost every day and the last time i was on the homepage the version was 0.42 and now it has some lite streaming funktionality i hope it will have shoutcast streaming funktionality soon.
But if you look at the version number 0.42 you see that it isn't a real build yet Peter Pawlowski is nice enoufh to let us use the unfinished builds anyway kudos to you Peter Pawlowski.